Very Fine People - E-Book Preorders Now Available

Everyone! Everyone!

Very Fine People is now available in e-Book as well as paperback!

Here's the Kobo. Here's the Kindle. Here's the Nook.

The other places should be available as well. Let me know if they aren't, and I will harumph about it until they are available there, too.

You can preorder it any of the places where books are sold, and if you go and order it you'll be doing the thing that helps authors more than anything else you can do (although promoting it on social media and reviewing it on the various sites also helps a whole bunch). Preorders make bookstores and other instruments of publishing take notice.

Ways you can preorder

Click here for PERSONALIZED SIGNED COPIES of the paperback. This will place a preorder order to my local independent bookseller, Schuler Books. They're great folks, so you'll be helping them out, too. Put your request for a personalized inscription in the "order comments" field at checkout, and I'll honor it (within reason).

If you don't care about a personalized signed edition (or you're outside of the U.S. and would like to avoid big shipping costs), I recommend that you call your local bookseller and ask them to preorder a copy. Give them the ISBN (979-8-9899949-0-8) if they ask. Local booksellers are the best, and I don't care who hears me say it. Help your local booksellers. You can order online with Bookshop.org and they will get it from your local bookseller! It's the best way to order books online!

Also: if you want to read absolutely and beautifully free, call your library and ask them to shelve it and carry the eBook. I get paid that way, too, so we are all good, and then many others can enjoy it if they so desire, free! Libraries are the only thing that might be better than local booksellers. We love libraries! Do this!

And yes you can also place online orders on the big places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble (these links go to U.S. sites, but it's available in other markets too).

And the audiobook will be dependent on how the paperback and eBook sell. I'm out of pocket for this (relying upon founding members), so before I undertake other time-intensive expense like producing an audio version I need to know how this thing is going to go.

And now some more thoughts about Very Fine People ...

My heart is pretty full about this book. I feel like it's already won.

When you have a book, people tend to ask how it's doing. This usually means sales, and it is a very natural question to ask. After all, it's out on the market; why wouldn't people want to know how it's performing?

My answer is that I have no idea how Very Fine People is going to perform. I probably never will know how it performed—not exactly. The Revisionaries sold some thousands of copies but I can't be sure between this format and that format. Did this perform "being a book" well? Maybe. I think it made money for my publisher, and that's nice. It made a decent little chunk for me, too, and that's very nice. I did not turn up my nose. I guess that makes it a successful performance in the ways people usually mean when they ask how it's doing, albeit a modest one.

It would be dishonest for me to suggest I don't want Very Fine People to be a success by that measure; I do. But there's the other measure, too—the one where some thousands of people have my book, and many of them actually read it, and some of them even liked it, and some of those even told me so. It's by that measure that I feel The Revisionaries "performed" as well as I could ever have hoped.

I think maybe a book wants to be bought, but I know for a fact it wants to be read.

And Very Fine People has already performed well by that measure, even though it won't be out for another 6 weeks or so. It exists because when I wrote essays, you all read them, and some of you even liked them, and some even told me so. This energized me to write some more, and you showed up for that, too. And then when I asked if you wanted to have them in a printed form, it turned out you did, and enough of you showed up for that to make it possible.

This is extraordinary stuff. Showing up is not guaranteed for writers. It can't be expected, and it mustn't be taken for granted. Nobody owes anybody any attention, and writing a bunch of words and offering to put them into a stranger's head is to say the least a weird proposition. For strangers to actually take you up on it makes them no longer strangers, in ways that are equally weird but no less real.

This is why I started by belaboring the different ways that a book can "perform." As with books, so with writers, who may want sales but absolutely need readers. Some of you have some money to spare and you spared it, and I honestly can't say how much I appreciate that, but the truth of the matter is, there are many ways for readers to show up for an author that don't cost a thing.

When you read something I wrote, you're showing up. I'd have never even dreamed of asking my readership if a book of essays was worth funding if there hadn't been a readership to ask.

When you tell somebody else about a writer, you're showing up. Whether it's a conversation with a friend or acquaintance, or you're lending your copy of a book, or you're sharing something that a writer wrote on the many medias social, you're showing up.

When you ask a library to stock a book, you're showing up.

When you write a review on one of the various review places, you're showing up.

When you tell a writer what their writing means to you, you're showing up.

When I started, I had no readers; I wrote for the joy of it. There was plenty of joy. It's fun to do, in my opinion. Writing for the joy of it is sustaining in its way, but writing for an audience that actually reads is sustaining in an entirely different way. When you're relying only on your own steam, you might eventually run out of steam. When there are more of you, there's just more steam. Would I still be writing if you weren't here? Maybe so. I can't say.

When I started writing there was this a stray dream about being a traditionally published writer—but it seemed as likely as me becoming an astronaut. It's still extraordinary to think that it happened almost 5 years ago (publishing a book, that is; I am still not an astronaut). I am now starting to look at the climbing paid membership of The Reframe and the support you've given me and it makes me start to think, for the first time, that someday, if it keeps climbing, I might someday become a writer full-time—something that may have been a stray dream, but as likely as becoming a ninja master.

It's still a dream. But I'll be polishing my throwing stars, all the same ... because who knows?

But now look. Because of all of you, there's another book.

And if you keep showing up, there'll very likely be another one, with all you founding members thanked in the acknowledgement. There are certainly many more essays that didn't make it into this book that could make it into another one. I don't see any reason why they won't make it into another one—not if you keep showing up.

But for now, we've got this one, available in print and electronic. If you've been reading all along, it will be familiar, but hopefully new, too. I can't wait for you to read it.

Tomorrow I'll be posting another chapter to the newsletter as a preview.

See you tomorrow.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the upcoming essay collection Very Fine People, which you can learn about how to support right here. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He is the end, my only friend, the end.