CHAPTER 14 — SELLING THE STORY
There was a small purple dinosaur sticker on the back of Raghav's own copy the next morning. His sister's work.
"You put a sticker on my book."
"It needed one."
"It didn't need one."
"It needed one," she said again, and watched him peel it off like he'd personally wronged her.
His father was at the table with the printer's invoice, going down the numbers again even though nothing about them had changed since yesterday. His mother had the book open, turning pages slowly.
Raghav sat down across from her. "How's anyone supposed to find it?"
Nobody answered right away.
"The stores have it," his father said eventually.
"A thousand copies. Forty-two places." Raghav did the division in his head again, even though he'd already done it twice. "That's what, twenty-five books a store. Sitting there with a hundred other things."
"So the bookstores sell it."
"They can put it on a shelf. That's it. That's all a shelf does." He wasn't trying to make it sound worse than it was, just saying it. "We spent eleven thousand dollars. Feels stupid to stop now."
His father didn't say anything to that. He just reached for a pen.
---
They ended up at the same table where they'd decided on the printer back in May.
"So what do we do," his father said.
"I don't know exactly." Raghav pulled the notebook toward himself. "Posters. Some newspaper space, the cheap kind. Send some copies to people who might write about it instead of just sell it."
"Which people?"
"I don't know yet. Whoever writes about books. We'll find out."
His mother said libraries. His father said the science clubs, and the bookstore near Intel that sold textbooks and also, apparently, some fiction. Raghav said radio, mostly as a joke, and nobody crossed it off, so it stayed on the list.
"That's a lot," his father said, looking at the page.
"We can't do all of it."
"So what do we actually do."
"I don't know yet," Raghav said again. Nobody seemed to mind that this was the second time he'd said it.
---
The poster came together a day later. Cover, title, one line above it that had already been through four versions.
*A SCIENCE-FICTION THRILLER.*
*WRITTEN BY A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD.*
His mother looked at it for a while. "What if people buy it just because he's thirteen. Read three pages. Decide it's not for them."
"That could happen."
"And if the stores put it with the children's books," his father said. "Because of that line."
"That's a different problem." Raghav had been turning this one over since the night before and still didn't have a clean answer, just a decision. "Genre first. Age second. That's the order it goes in."
Nobody had a better idea, so that was what they did.
His father was still looking at the layout. "Some of these are going to community papers. Malhotra's contacts. There's ones for—" he stopped for a second, "—people like us. And some for other neighborhoods, near the other stores."
"Does the wording change?" his mother asked.
"A little. Not the book." Raghav didn't love how that sounded, tried again. "It's the same book everywhere. We're just picking what line goes first."
His mother didn't say anything to that. She also didn't say no.
So he made three versions to actually show her, instead of just talking about it.
One was plain. *A SCIENCE-FICTION THRILLER. 101,842 WORDS. WRITTEN BY A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD.* Nothing else.
The second kept the cover the same but changed the top line. *ONE THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD. ONE NOVEL. A LOCAL FAMILY'S FIRST BOOK.* That one was for the smaller community papers, where "local family" meant something to whoever picked up the paper.
The third didn't mention his age at all. Just the word count and the genre. That one was for the science-fiction newsletter, the one that ran out of somebody's garage, where nobody was going to care how old he was, only whether the book sounded worth sending away for.
"Same book," he said, laying the three out. "Same cover. I'm not writing three books. Just deciding what goes first."
His mother picked up the second one, read it twice, put it down. Didn't say anything. Raghav had learned by now that meant she'd stopped arguing and started thinking about how to fix it instead.
---
His sister wandered past the table while he was still looking at them.
"What do you see," Raghav asked her, mostly out of curiosity.
"Dinosaur."
"What else."
She looked harder. "Thirteen. That's you."
"That's me."
That seemed to settle it for her. She wandered off with one of the posters and Raghav found it later taped to the fridge, upside down.
"That's upside down."
"It's not."
"It is."
"The dinosaur's the same either way," she said, and walked off, and he left it there.
---
They brought the poster by Malhotra's a few days later.
"How many people know this book exists right now," he asked, before anyone had said hello properly.
"Not many," Raghav said.
"Right." He set the poster down without really looking at it again. "A store doesn't care what you think of your own book. They care if someone's going to walk in and ask for it. You want a reorder, you need someone asking first. I've had a few places take copies just to be polite. That's fine. Doesn't mean anything yet."
"How many took copies just to be polite?"
"Ten, fifteen, some places. A couple took more." He shrugged. "You won't know anything for a week or two. That's normal."
Raghav wrote that part down. The waiting part.
---
The press package took longer than he expected. A copy of the book. A page explaining what it was. His mother typed the author note on the typewriter from her bank, because their own didn't have a working ribbon anymore.
"Do we say anything else about him," his father asked, halfway through an envelope. "The other stuff."
"No."
"Nothing?"
"Just the book. He's thirteen. It's this long. That's already unusual enough."
His father let it go, though he looked at the stack of envelopes a while longer than he needed to.
They didn't send many. A few local papers. A couple of names Malhotra had passed along. One science-fiction newsletter run out of somebody's garage that Malhotra said mattered more than its size suggested.
"You're being careful with these," his father said, watching him check the list again before sealing the last one.
"They cost something too. Not money. Just—" Raghav didn't finish the sentence, and his father didn't ask him to.
---
The budget took less time to settle than the poster had.
"Two thousand," Raghav said, sliding the notebook over so his father could check it, which he always did now. "Posters, the newspaper space, mailing the review copies. A little left over."
His mother came over from the kitchen and looked at the number herself. "That's separate from the eleven."
"It's separate," Raghav said. "The eleven was the book. This is just getting people to know it exists, marketing budget. I want it in its own column. Otherwise I won't be able to tell what actually did anything."
She nodded slowly at that, the way she did when something matched how she already thought about money.
"Out of the reserve?" his father asked.
"Out of the reserve. It's grown enough since May that this doesn't touch it much." He checked the number anyway. His father would ask to see it regardless.
His father looked at the figure a while, tapping his pencil against the table. "Two thousand. Nothing more unless there's a reason."
"That's the idea."
---
"You're running this like an experiment," his father said one evening, looking at the pile of poster versions.
"It is one."
"Then don't change everything at once. If three things go out different this week and one of them works, you won't know which."
"I know. I'm only changing one thing at a time, batch to batch."
"Good." His father went back to his tea.
Raghav sat there a minute longer. It wasn't a complicated thing to say. His father said things like that about equipment at Intel all the time, without ever seeming to notice he'd said anything worth remembering.
---
By the end of the week, everything had actually gone out. Not all at once, and not randomly. Malhotra's stores got the general version, taped inside the window at eye level, where he said people actually looked. The community papers got the second version, with a note his mother insisted on writing herself, by hand, because she said a handwritten note got read more carefully than a typed one. The science club board near the university got the third one, next to a flyer for a chess tournament and one for a physics lecture nobody Raghav knew had gone to. Two libraries agreed to a flyer on their board, after his father filled out a form neither of them had known existed until that week.
The review copies were somewhere in the mail. And after that, there was nothing left to do.
He found that harder than the actual work had been.
He drew a table in his notebook one evening — date, store, copies sent, copies sold, which version, any response — and looked at the empty rows for a while before closing it. Nothing to write yet. That was fine.
His mother caught him looking at the closed notebook that night. "Nothing?"
"Nothing."
"You did what you could."
"I did what I could afford," he said, which felt closer to true, though he didn't know why it mattered which way he put it.
---
The call came on a Tuesday, almost a week after the posters went up.
It was one of Malhotra's stores, a small place two towns over that had taken fifteen copies without much enthusiasm, as far as Raghav understood. The owner had called Malhotra, and Malhotra called them within the hour.
"Sold out. She wants twenty more. Maybe thirty if you've got them."
Raghav wrote the number down before he let himself think about it. Fifteen copies. Not a lot.
His father read it over his shoulder. "That's good."
"It's one store."
"It's one store that ran out," his father said, and didn't add anything else.
Raghav was still looking at the number when the phone rang again, twenty minutes later. He didn't think anything of it until his mother picked it up.
"Hello?" A pause. Longer than usual. She looked over at him. "Yes. He's here."
She held the receiver out, one hand over the mouthpiece.
"I don't know who it is," she said. "They didn't say."
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