One Click, Any Library in Virginia

There is a version of this business that runs entirely on selling. Tables at festivals, boxes in the trunk, cards handed across a folding table, the constant low arithmetic of whether a weekend paid for itself. I like that version. I have spent most of this summer in it.

But there is another way a book finds people, and it does not involve anyone paying me at all.

LOST was selected for Indie Virginia: Discover Books From Local Authors, the statewide Indie Author Project collection on BiblioBoard. Which means that any library patron in Virginia can now open the app, tap once, and read it. No hold list. No waiting for the one copy to come back. No cost to them.

I have been turning that over for a few days and I keep landing in the same place: this is the part of publishing I actually wanted.

Why this one felt different

I want to be honest about the shape of independent publishing, because I think people imagine it as more glamorous than it is. Most of the doors you walk through, you paid to walk through. A booth fee. A table fee. A submission fee. There is nothing wrong with that, and I have paid plenty of them gladly. But you learn to notice the difference between buying your way into a room and being invited into one.

Indie Virginia is not an open shelf. Books submitted to the Indie Author Project are read and evaluated by curators and librarian editorial boards before they go into a collection. Librarians decide. People whose entire profession is judging whether a book earns the space it takes up on a shelf, and who have no reason at all to be generous with a self-published novel from a violin teacher in Blacksburg.

They said yes. I am still a little wobbly about it.

Libraries were the first place I ever belonged

I grew up the kind of child who read in the car, at the table, under the covers with a flashlight, and who understood the public library as a place where nobody would tell me I had taken too much. You could walk in with nothing and leave with an armful. That was the deal. It seemed almost illegally good.

I did not know then that I would spend my adult life writing books, or that I would spend a summer of it driving all over Virginia and Florida with a crate of them in the back seat. But if you had told twelve-year-old me that one day her book would be in the library, in every library, free to anyone who wanted it, she would not have asked a single follow-up question about royalties.

There is a straight line from that kid to this week, and I do not think I have ever seen it as clearly.

What it actually means

A few practical things, since I have been asked.

It is free to the reader. If your library participates, you download the BiblioBoard Library app or use the web version, and LOST is there.

It reaches people I will never meet. I can drive to Roanoke and Staunton and Johnson City and stand behind a table all weekend, and I love doing it, but there is a hard limit on how many hands I can put a book into personally. This has no such limit. Someone in Norfolk or Bristol or a small town I have never heard of can find it at eleven at night without leaving the house.

It does not replace buying the book. Both things can be true. Library reading has never cannibalized sales in any serious study I have seen. It creates readers, and readers eventually buy things, and more importantly they tell other people.

And it means something for the series. LOST is Book One. UNTOLD is the companion novella. FORGOTTEN, Book Two, arrived in a box on my porch this week and is genuinely beautiful. If someone borrows LOST from the library and falls in, the rest is waiting.

Thank you, and a small ask

Thank you to the Indie Author Project, to BiblioBoard, and to the Virginia librarians who read submissions and make these calls. I know it is unglamorous work. I know most authors never think about who did it.

If you are a Virginia reader: go borrow it. Genuinely. That is the whole point.

And if your library does not participate in Indie Virginia yet, tell them about it. The program only works because libraries opt in, and librarians tend to listen when a patron asks for something by name.

If you are an independent author in Virginia: submit. Costs nothing. The worst outcome is that you find out.

The Fates do not punish. They prepare.