Small Damages: the Dutch translation arrives

Callenbach has produced this beautiful Dutch translation of Small Damages.

I am ever-grateful to Tamra Tuller, Kiffin Steurer, and the Philomel team for taking such good care of this book.

And so grateful to Callenbach for having faith.

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self promotion? friendship? what do we really want, as writers?

I'm going to be downright honest with you.  Launching a book prickles me over.  I hail from failed Girl Scout Cookies sales roots, after all.  I ripple with panic (more than a pebble's toss worth) every time I have to price a corporate project (and that's my business, my family's livelihood).  I send announcement e-mails out about my books in full-force cringe.  I am graciously invited into bookstores and then apologize to any friend who might want to come.  I'm sure you're busy, I'll say.  Don't feel you have to come.

It's an itchy enterprise, this book thing.  I want my books to succeed, and I especially want Small Damages to succeed because I am working with such exceptional people at Philomel and I cannot let them down.  I worry about unhappy reviews and reviewers for their sake.  I worry about sales because people I love have believed in me, and I want to deliver for them.

Still, I struggle with self-promotion.  I struggle to find balance.  I want to look out, beyond myself— reporting on the books of others (only the books I love, obviously, for I am not quite sure what any blogger gains from reporting on books that were not loved), reflecting on the world at large, honoring neighbors, children, family, friends.  I want to connect in a very real way with people.  I want to generate positivity against the dark clouds of 2012—the heat of summer, the terror in a theater, the buried secrets of a certain university and an assistant football coach, the final ebbing away of loved ones.

Yesterday, as you know from the identical picture in the previous-to-this-one post, I launched Small Damages at Chester County Book and Music Company, a store that brought us all so much for three full decades but is now on a month-to-month lease.  It is the Kindle, not the economy in general, that some believe hurt this gigantic independent. The Kindle, a machine.  Bookstores are about community.  Machines most often aren't.  We writers and readers are losing, in CCBM, a glowing, active hearth, and we will be so much the poorer for this.

Yesterday was a Saturday in mid-summer.  I am who I am, no actual rock star (despite my pumpkin-dashed-with-paprika pants).  Nonetheless, A.S. King drove all the way from where she lives (I call it a castle, she swears that it isn't) and K.M. Walton flew in from down the road (on fairy wings, with sparkle), and Joanne Fritz sat among us, and we talked, until a teen reader and her mom and, then, two friends joined in.  Maybe some people would want to be surrounded by crowds at a book launch.  I could not have been happier than this—the intimacy of the conversation, the honest exchange, the talk that went on and on until Amy and Kate and I looked at our respective time-announcing gadgets and realized that dinner in our households was about to begin.  Amy, Kate, and I are writers first.  We live the writing life.  We had stories to tell, no bravada behind which to hide, no desire to be anything but ourselves.  We loved our teen reader and her mom for encouraging a life with books.  We loved Joanne and CCBM for making room for us there.  We loved the two best friends who went home armed with their own piles of books.  We loved spending time not wanting to be, but being.

I signed my very first copy of Small Damages to a teen reader named Julia.  I laughed until I ached with Kate and Amy.  I went home counting my luck for being in this odd but beautiful business of publishing.  And then I took a walk in the neighborhood that is home to me and felt the breeze kicking up through my hair.

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a video thanks, and the Small Damages jacket reveal

The Small Damages jacket reveal and a big thank you to all of you ... all offered up in less than two minutes.

Check out the Mood T-shirt.

smoking!

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the big news: Small Damages sells to Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books

I began my travels to southern Spain more than 16 years ago.  I met an old man named Luis, who cooked for me when I was sick.  I found a bathtub full of oranges high up, on an old, odd roof.  I met one of the King's best friends, southern Spain's finest breeder of bulls, and he took me out in an open jeep, where the unsuspecting herd was chewing.  I watched the flamenco dancers dance; I climbed the towers; I studied the bridge. I read of the war, and I read of survivors, and I tracked down old memoirs from the Franco era, preserving the recipes I'd find clenched within the pages.  Seville was home to my brother-in-law, Rodi, his wife, and their children, and so to Seville my husband, son, and I would repeatedly return.  I walked through doors few do.

For years, I worked on a book I called Small Damages, except for the years during which I thought of it as The Last Threads of Saffron.  The novel evolved over time—became a story of gypsies, a story of the deaf, a story of an old cook's love affair.  Last summer, just about this time, I shared a draft of the book with Tamra Tuller, an editor at Philomel Books, whose Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird) would go on to win the 2010 National Book Award and whose Ruty Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) would appear on the bestseller list in her debut week earlier this year.  Tamra had ideas about Small Damages.  She encouraged me to keep working.  She emerged as one of those rare editors who agrees to read again, who quietly and gainfully encourages. 

Tamra shares, with me, a love of travel, a love of exotic foods, even a love of the TV show "Top Chef."  Tamra is also, as of today, thanks to the announcement (below) in the PW Children's Bookshelf, the editor of Small Damages.  I don't think I can express just what this means to me.

Tamra is kind, and she is smart.  She works within a team—which includes my dear former editor Jill Santopolo (who introduced me to Tamra by way of Ruta's book) and the remarkable Michael Green—that makes a writer feel at home.

My great thanks, then, to Tamra, to Jill, to Michael, to Philomel, and to my agent, Amy Rennert.  My thanks, too, to Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Alyson Hagy, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Ivy Goodman, who read this book over time and kept me believing in it.  Maybe it took ten years and eighty drafts to write the book that Small Damages finally is.  But the book feels brand new and just right and full of hope in the hands of Tamra Tuller.

Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books bought world rights to National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart’s YA novel Small Damages, a coming-of-age story set in southern Spain about the difficult choices a teenaged girl faces when she gets pregnant. The publication is scheduled for summer 2012; Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency brokered the deal. 

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