On Books and Blogs

I envy my literary friends who travel to Europe and across America speaking and signing in prestigious book stores. I have joked that as a writer I was once famous in four counties, but since all the new people have moved to Franklin, I am now famous in three counties. Last year at the Southern Festival of Books, I was fortunate to participate in three panels. One panel related to my recent book, Politics, Preaching & Philosophy, and two other panels with other writers in collected anthologies.

Writing, like any other of the fine arts, refines the soul of the artist and usually draws the praise of friends and family who love you with or without your artistic skills. For any writer, we live for that day that we come to believe that we have “fans” who are strangers beyond the sound of our voice, and our circle of friendship. I think that came for me last year, eighteen years after my first published book.

At the suggestion (insistence) of friends, with the help of my favorite daughter, we created a blog, Bill Peach’s Random Thoughts, from the title of my third book. Since then I have 53 posts, 2000 views and 15 subscribers, for which I am grateful. I have been blessed that other bloggers have included links to this.

However, once you have a bound print copy of a book, your life becomes a continuous potential book signing wherever you go, wherever you are. The Earth-shaking and mind-bending ideas which you put in a manuscript are out there to be read and discussed by all. There is a personal vanity about being a writer, in selling a book, in signing a book to be cherished and saved for posterity. Not just the ideas within the book, but the physical, tangible book itself.

I have across the mantle in my bedroom/library/office an array of autographed books. These signatories are not just authors, but real friends, some famous, some less famous. One exception is a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, given to me by a friend, autographed by Harper Lee, whom I have never met. I cannot feel anything but love and admiration for the woman who created Atticus Finch, a creature of fiction who became the personification of Southern morality and intellect at a time when Southern role models were few.

Those of us who write essays, or creative non-fiction, and short stories have much less lasting imagery than those who write the great works of fiction. I don’t know the proper mission of those who write persuasive non-fiction or essays. I usually try to explain this by quoting my grandmother who said, or at least believed – “You should pick up every piece of information you find. You hold it and study it and consider its value. Then if you should find that it does not fit into your Truth, you put it back where you found it and leave it for the next person into whose Truth it might fit.” Non-fiction, or the essay, is the collection of those thoughts that you believe to be true, presented to the reader, as one option in the marketplace of ideas.

In the eighteen years since I was first published, my book sales have been modest, maybe around 5,000 copies. Occasionally, someone whom I may not know will comment in passing, “I read your book (or books) and I loved it.”

You and I are in awe of the electronic immediacy of blogs, facebook, and the devices and ubiquity of the internet. The day may come when the bound, printed pages of the book may become obsolete. For now, books continue to be that unique mechanism beyond television, radio, and beyond the brevity of twitter, through which we can convey the complexity of our thoughts, the vastness of our imagination, and the artistry of our semantics.

Explore posts in the same categories: Literature

Tags: book signings, Non-fiction, Southern Festival of Books

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