4 minute read

a book like this

“Nobody wants to read a book like this,” one publishing consultant told me before I’d published Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss.

Snarky-like, I wanted to say, “I would’ve preferred never to have written a book like this, and to never read one like it either, but…here we are.”

I knew a book like mine, about the death of a child, wasn’t ever going to be easy to promote or sell. 

I was content to just publish my story.

Maybe nobody would turn into one reader at a time. I’d be fine with that.

“Writing a book wasn’t going to bring Sam back, but maybe, in time, the writing would change me.”

(from Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss, Chapter 8. Grieving)

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I’d written Willower for myself — to keep my beautiful boy Sam alive, for my family, and, for that one reader who, like me, was trying to rewrite her life after unimaginable loss.

that one reader

When writing a book, it helps to envision who you’re talking to by defining that one reader:

The bereaved mother who feels alone in her grief, and is seeking wisdom from someone who’s been there and will tell her the truth. She needs to know whether her sorrow will ever feel less heavy—and if there’s even a word to name her grief. (She’ll nod, yes, when she comes to it: willower…) She’s reading to find hope, and inspiration, a reason to live, and laugh again. Most of all, she wants to find a way to keep her child’s memory alive. And perhaps, one day, be capable of rewriting her story after….

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a spam email

It’s been almost three years now since I published Willower. And recently, I received a spammy-looking email from a “book promoter” in which I read: “For such a well-reviewed book, why isn’t it selling better?”

It wasn’t the artificial-sounding email—with no way to contact the “book promoter” unless I clicked on that suspicious link—that gnawed at me. It was that stinger:

“Nobody wants to read a book like this.”

And then…

an unexpected message

Out of the blue…

Just in the nick of time…

Just when I was feeling extra snarky, I received a counter to that spammy email—an unexpected and heartfelt message from that one reader who wrote:

I’d hoped when I was envisioning my defined reader that she might find something small and miraculous in the lunacy of my words, but couldn’t have predicted….

Thank you, Sherry.

and so…

Not for nothing, but one reader is not nobody.

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