Growing up with BOOKS and the first week down!
Blog tour kicks back up on Monday, so today I'm taking it a little easy. 
THE REASON IS YOU has been out in the world for one week now, and I couldn't be happier. It's everything I hoped it would be like, seeing it out there, hearing from readers. Of course I'm told this is Week One Euphoria (see Roni Loren's post in January about the stages of a book release…it's hysterical…lol). And that's okay. I'm aware that there won't always be people loving my book–right now that's all I'm hearing from–but it will come. The bad reviews and negativity. I know. And I'm prepared with my big girl armor to shake it off when it happens because this industry is brutal and you never please everyone. But right now? I'm floating with the chirpy birds and rainbows. Even problems like local bookstores not getting my books in and late shipments–it's okay. It's all good.
On another subject, I wanted to talk about something that came up in an email loop I'm involved in, on the number of Americans that had never read a book. Ever.
From the Pew Research Study on ebooks vs print:
However, 19% of respondents aged 16 and over said that they hadn't read a single book in any format, over the previous 12 months – the highest since such surveys on American reading habits began in 1978. If this figure is accurate, that means more than 50 million Americans don't read books at all.
I can't even begin to comprehend that. And it stirred up a great conversation on how we grew up, whether we were introduced to books and what our children do now. I personally was in our town library more than anything else as a child. My mom and I went every single Saturday and sometimes more than that, and I can still remember the smell of that tiny old library. It's been replaced now, but I remember it being a magical place. My mom would go one direction and I'd go another. I went through all those red hardcover books about Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket and Pocahontas…lol…and all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews. I won the Summer Reading Clubs every summer, having to staple extra pages to the forms. And I remember the sound of the card puncher when I'd hand it up to the librarian to check out my books…the kachoooga…of it. LOL! I thought she was the luckiest person in the world to be in such a place all day long. I even remember her name. It was Miss Virginia.
How on earth do I remember that? Because reading was a staple activity in my home. I don't remember being read TO, but I'm sure I was, because I was hooked on all my Little Golden Books stacked deep on my bookshelf when I was little.
I've read ever since. I owned an indie bookstore for a couple of years when we came back to Texas, and it was heaven on earth to me and to my daughter. See…we read to her since she was an infant, and before she could really read, she was "reading" by memory, turning the pages and repeating the words she'd heard day after day after day. I brought her to the library every weekend, too, and later when she was in middle school, she'd walk there after school till I got off work, and sit and read whatever struck her fancy that day. She's seventeen now, and has read more in her life than I ever have. She reads 4-5 at one time, and her most precious gift is a Barnes & Noble gift card where she can go get lost in the magic of the store.
So I can't imagine never reading a book. Can you? Tell me your experience.
Tagged: book launch, libraries, reading, romance, roni loren, sharla lovelace, the reason is you, womens fiction
