Eleven is my lucky number
, so today’s post is about numbers. One in particular: the number of copies of a book that must sell in a single week for it to land on the New York Times bestseller list.
I polled friends and family to see if they knew the answer. My 13-year-old said 2,000; one friend guessed 50,000; another, “half a mill.” Damn.
I am not a numbers person. My mother is. She still runs a small accounting business from home, at a highly respectable age whose exact number I will not name. My elementary school era was defined by the plasticky clacking of keys on my mother’s adding machine as she sat at the kitchen table doing taxes while deep in conversation, without ever having to look down at her fingers. She loves navigation, the phases of the moon, Suduko, and all things measurable. Math is her native tongue.
The finiteness of numbers scares me a little, though. I prefer multitudes, ambiguities, and unresolved endings. They make better stories; plus counting can be tiresome. When I run, I rarely tabulate my miles or monitor my pace. I can’t even keep track of time very well; I’m almost always 20 minutes later in finishing a run than I planned to be. When I try to count my breaths in meditation, I typically get lost before I get to ten. In writing, I don’t set daily word or page count goals; I probably should. I tend to overwrite.
Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World isn’t about numbers—it’s about infinity. That’s how many brief flashings are all around us all the time. The little sparks of ordinary wonder never stop coming. With practice, we can learn to see them more clearly. I didn’t write Brief Flashings to get on a list. I wrote it to tell a story that, as I say in the introduction, “might be of use to someone somewhere, fumbling through the dark mysteries of their own life.”
There’s no point keeping your head in the sand, though. I had to see what I was up against. If you don’t know, how can try your best? This is one of the central themes of Zen—and Brief Flashings: you have to make true effort. As the Japanese Zen master, Suzuki Shunryu writes in Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, “When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind . . . You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. Zen activity is activity which is completely burned out, with nothing remaining but ashes.” In sports-speak, you have to leave it all out there.
So I did it. I googled the answer: 5,000.
Frankly, I was surprised. It’s lower than I thought, by kind of a lot. It seems almost…doable. If I liked math, I could figure out how many of you would have to recommend it to how many of your friends who’d have to recommend it to how many of theirs—all of whom would have to buy it in the span of seven days—to hit 5,000 sales. (If you know how to solve this exponential equation, let me know. ((Mom?)) Then we can see if it works.)
This could be the part where I temper this with caveat that publicists have said since the dawn of time (and I probably said myself when I was a publicist): “But the numbers don’t always add up.” This is very true. You can book all the interviews, make the rounds of the book tour circuit, go on podcasts, and still not hit that benchmark. No one I’ve encountered in publishing seems to have cracked the magic formula. Because there isn’t one.
But I prefer to look at it the same way I look at writing and running and life: Anything is possible.
Whatever happens with Brief Flashings, it’s not a smoky fire. I know it will throw sparks wherever it goes. In the meantime, I’m going to start paying closer attention to the most fun numbers of all, right in front of me:
Number of black dogs lolling at my feet: 2
Number of girls getting ready for bed: 2
Number of husbands currently singing “Eat It,” by Weird Al Yankovich
On that note, I’m off next week to Spain with my family (number of miles we’ll walk on Camino de Santiago: 70.) ‘Work in process’ will return on Friday March 29 with lots of stories, I’m sure.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already, please tell your friends to tell their friends to tell their friends to pre-order Brief Flashings today because—I learned this, too—ALL pre-orders count toward the first week of sales. Now that’s magic!
We can do this!
xo katie
Spots are going quickly at River Flow Camp, May 30—June 2, hosted by the super cool glamping outpost, Field Trip NM, with special guest teachers NATALIE GOLDBERG, KELLY BURNS, AND JEFF ENGLISH. Join us!
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Katie, I was excited to read that you are walking the camino. It's been on my bucket list for years and I hope to walk it next year. What smart timing for you and your family to do it right before your book comes out. I know you will have a profound experience. The camino is a healing walk of love. I wish you buen camino. Look forward to hearing about it.