The Computer vs. the Bookseller

In this computerized age, sales figures rule a writer's career. The chains know exactly what we've sold in the past, and place orders for new books accordingly. Publishers—all too aware of what those orders are likely to be—are less apt to commit to authors with middling sales. So what hope is there for a mature author looking for a broader readership, let alone a breakout novel?

As I began writing Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I had all but given up on finding the answer to that question, because the sales of my previous four books were "not up to expectations." I knew that good reviews, awards and a publisher's best intentions didn't necessarily translate into strong sales. But in the end, I discovered the answer through my encounters with one of the most old-fashioned aspects of the business.

The knowledge that my book could fail despite my own and my publishers' best efforts freed me to pursue themes that might have struck me as a tough sell earlier in my career. Don't get me wrong: I loved writing about footbinding, regret and 19th-century Chinese women who conversed in a secret language, but those subjects didn't exactly seem like a fast track to the bestseller list.

To help counteract the self-fulfilling prophecy of modest sales, Random House sent out advanced reader's editions of my book seven months before its publication last June. And to my surprise, booksellers responded on a personal level.

The first e-mail came from Donna Gwynn of Mosquito Books in the airport at Anchorage, Alaska, who wanted me to know that she liked my novel. Then I received e-mails from Sue Boucher and her staff at Lake Forest Bookstore, in Illinois, asking me to consider a lunch event. When Snow Flowerbecame a BookSense number one pick a few months later, the Los Angeles book publicist Suzanne Wickham told me I could be "cautiously optimistic."

On the way to the Lake Forest event, I asked my escort how many people he thought would brave the heat to come. "Maybe 30," he answered. When we walked in, we found 125 people. As I signed books, I asked the women why they were there. "We never heard of you, but Sue Boucher said we had to come," they answered. "She's been talking about you for months." It was the first time I truly understood the power of the evangelism between a bookseller and a customer.

Almost every day on tour, a bookseller would confide, "I never heard of you before." Though that wasn't the best news, what he or she said next always thrilled me. "But we're selling your book to all of our book groups. We can't keep it in stock." Gradually, I realized this wasn't just one-on-one handselling; sales were spreading from book group to book group.

It turned out that what I had thought was difficult and esoteric in Snow Flowerwere the very things that resonated with booksellers. Something about the strange, distant world in my novel had managed to get under their skin, and their desire to share the book with other readers somehow eclipsed the question of my previous sales.

Booksellers' enthusiasm helped keep the book on the Los Angeles Timesbestseller list for 25 weeks and counting, pushing the number of copies in print to 90,000, after 12 printings. I even got an e-mail from a reader who'd been stuck in the Anchorage airport, where "a very persistent woman told me I had to buy your book."

So at a time when the industry adamantly embraces its numbers game, I have a new appreciation for the role of the individual bookseller, who not only brings books and readers together, but can make totally unexpected things happen—one book, one customer, one book group at a time.