Chris Huntington emails Boaz from the Road
I hope you and Elizabeth have been having a lovely summer. My crew and I have been traveling around, eating our weight in Mexican food (because you can’t get anything like a good burrito in our part of China), and sitting in bookstores. Also been drinking some IPA because we missed all this delicious beer. Dag hasn’t missed beer, but he has been eating some good ice cream, which is something else that is pretty exotic in Xiamen, China.
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to sell some books but see now just how hard it is and even though I’ve read about it my whole life, I really had no idea that the industry was negotiated on such a scale. I feel like for me it’s going to be one book at a time. I half-expected some kind of wind to blow through the country and put our book into the front windows of all these storefronts. Anyway, I’m proud of the book we’ve made and think it looks fantastic. Elizabeth’s cover is a nice mix of literary and direct, and the fade on the back is subtle but lets the words stand out nicely and the front is suitably confident and mysterious. I like it a lot.
I recently did a signing at my hometown bookstore, which was all right, though mostly the store was full of my parents’ friends. I did another in Indianapolis (an Indy shop called BIG HAT) and that was a dream come true, just because it was a beautiful store full of wood detail and smart books and although I know the owner, I didn’t know all her customers. One woman brought a book up to me after I read (and I was so relieved to get lots of laughs —you were right, Shasta was wrong, the book IS funny), anyway, a woman brought a book up for me to sign and said, “We went to high school together.” I hadn’t recognized her but it was someone I totally crushed on when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. So that was nice, in the fulfillment of a daydream kind of way that I was able to quietly enjoy in the car the next day as Shasta, Dag, and I drove out to Maine and the highway went on forever.
We get back to Indiana Sunday (en sh’Allah) and Monday I’m going to Indy to interview with the local NPR station. The station has a weekly arts show called The Art of the Matter and I’m hoping that will sell a few more copies.
I’ve seen some numbers thanks to Amazon, and I have to admit I’m a little disappointed. Opening month or so and we’re still in the hundreds. I think that’s an embarrassingly low number for a country of 280 million people, but at this point, I’ve had the experience of complete strangers telling me why they liked it, so my happiness is essentially endless.
Here in Maine, we’re staying in a village way up past Steven King country and the only way I can get Internet is by sitting in a shoe store and paying the owner $6 an hour, so I’m typing this off-line (Tuesday) and hope to send it tomorrow or Thursday.
My best to you and Elizabeth. Thank you again for making this one of the best summers of my life.
Chris
Ten years in the making, my novel Mike Tyson Slept Here hit the shelves May 15. ISBN 978-1-893448-10-0Please check it out. It’s funny and sad and beautiful. Just like you. More information at chrishuntingtononline.com
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