Pub Day!

My new novel, Burner, is officially available today! Those of you who pre-ordered should receive your copy today if you haven’t already, and those of you who have not purchased the novel yet can do so now on Bookshop.org, Books Inc, Amazon, or your favorite book store.

For an author, the publication day for a new book is a complex basket of conflicting emotions. It can be hectic because you’re at the peak of publicity and promotion for the title. It can be anxious because the book is finally being read by real readers who might love it or hate it. It can feel helpless because the fate of the book is largely out of your control by this point. And it can also, in many ways, feel anticlimactic. There’s no fanfare in my home office today—no cheering crowd, no fireworks, no celebration (though a cork of champagne might be popped later). All those countless hours of work getting a book written and published are encapsulated in something so simple—just another 350-page paperback.

And yet, of course, a book is so much more. This moment, when people actually read and react to what you’ve written, is why I became an author in the first place. I want my work to not only entertain, but to be thought-provoking. To stimulate conversation and challenge conventional beliefs. As those 350 pages are consumed, discussed, challenged, and embraced, they become so much more than words on paper (or a screen). As much as I appreciate each and every one of you who buys my novel, what is orders of magnitude more important to me is that you actually read my novel. I know that the real investment is not the $17.95 cover price, it’s the 9-10 hours of your time that it will take you to read it. That is the most generous support you can offer any author—to dedicate the time to read what they wrote, to select that title as one of the dozen-or-so books the average person will read in a year. With so many things competing for your time and attention, I deeply appreciate you taking the time to read, and hopefully review, my book.

Here’s a quick video I shot commemorating today. I’ll be celebrating in person this Thursday, April 18th at 6:30 p.m. at Books Inc in Palo Alto where I’ll be discussing the topics raised in the novel with my fellow author, Chris Yeh. We’ll have refreshments as well, so I hope you can join me then to raise a glass. Then, for me, it will be on to the next book.