CHAPTER 15 — THE WORLD NOTICES
The first numbers back from the bookstores weren't much of anything.
Two copies sold from one store. Four sold from the other. One store reported six, which made it the best performer in the group for about a day, until Raghav realized that was still only six books. A handful of stores hadn't sold a single copy yet. Most of the original thousand were still sitting on shelves exactly where they'd been left.
His father looked at the notebook over his shoulder one evening. "That's not bad."
"It's not really anything yet either."
"What were you expecting?"
"I don't know. Not this fast." Raghav closed the notebook. "The advertisements have only been up a few days. It takes time before anyone sees them, and then more time before they actually walk into a store."
His father didn't push it further, and Raghav didn't either. There wasn't much else to say about these few copies.
---
The first thing that actually changed wasn't a number. It was what the numbers meant.
One store called to say someone had come in asking for the book by name — not browsing, not picking it up off a shelf, but asking a clerk if they had it. Another store said the same thing happened twice in one afternoon. A third mentioned a woman who came back a second time because she wanted another copy for her sister.
Raghav added a line to his table. Whether the customer had asked for it by name, or just found it. It felt like a small thing to track, but it wasn't the same kind of sale.
His father noticed the new column. "What's that for?"
"Somebody walking in already looking for it is different than somebody finding it by accident. I want to know which one's happening."
His father nodded slowly, like he was turning that over, and didn't say anything else about it.
---
The real jump came from the community papers.
Three stores that had been sitting flat for a week suddenly weren't. One reported fifteen copies gone in two days. Another said eleven. A third, eighteen. Raghav checked the number twice before he believed it, then called Malhotra to check again.
"They're asking for it," Malhotra said. "People are coming in and asking."
That was the part that mattered more than the count. Somebody had seen the ad, decided the book was worth walking into a store for, and then it had actually held them once they picked it up.
Three days after that, all three stores had run through what they'd been given.
"So the advertising worked," Raghav said, mostly to himself.
His father was standing nearby. "You sound surprised."
"I was hoping it would. That's not the same as expecting it."
---
Malhotra called two days later, and he didn't sound like he was talking about a favor to a family he liked anymore.
"I've got stores asking when they can get more. Some of them want to know if I can hold copies for them before anyone else gets a shot."
"How many are we talking?"
"Enough that five thousand isn't going to cover a second run. Five thousand got you here. It won't get you through what's coming next." He paused. "You go small again, you'll be back here in three weeks having this same conversation with me."
They sat with that for a minute. Raghav had been thinking five thousand, the same number as before, because it was the number he already understood. Before he answered, he did the arithmetic properly, the way he always did before saying anything about money out loud.
Eleven thousand to print the first five thousand copies. Two thousand more on marketing. Thirteen thousand, all in, spent since May. Of those five thousand books, four thousand nine hundred had already sold or were sitting in bookstore orders waiting to be paid out. The other hundred had never actually been for sale — numbers one through a hundred, set aside from the first carton off the truck, kept at home. Not unsold stock. Just his.
At just under eight dollars a copy, the 4,900 that had gone out came to thirty-seven thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five dollars. Against thirteen thousand spent, that left something close to twenty-five thousand dollars sitting on the right side of the ledger, before anyone had even talked about a second printing.
He hadn't fully let himself add it up until right then, sitting there with Malhotra waiting on the line. It wasn't a question of whether they could afford ten thousand more books. They already had.
"Ten thousand," Malhotra said. "That's where I'd go."
Nobody argued with him.
---
The second printing cost less per copy than the first had — a dollar eighty-five instead of two-twenty — because the plates and the setup were already paid for. That opened up a question nobody had planned on.
"We could drop the price," Raghav said, one evening, with the new numbers laid out on the table.
His mother frowned at that. "Won't people think it's worth less if it's cheaper?"
"Maybe some. I don't know." Raghav had been turning this over for a day and still didn't have a clean answer, just a decision he was more comfortable with than the alternative. "The first run already told us people will pay full price for it. That part's settled. What we don't know yet is how many more people would buy it if it cost a little less. That's a different question."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then we made less money on ten thousand books instead of finding out." He shrugged. "I'd rather know."
His mother didn't look fully convinced, but she also didn't say no. They settled on seven twenty-five, fifty cents down from the first run, still leaving room on every copy even after the bookstore and Malhotra both took their share.
---
The other neighborhoods took longer. Not weeks longer, but noticeably slower than the first three stores had been.
A store near the university reported a few sales to what the owner called "college kids." Another, further out, said a couple of teenagers had bought copies within a day of each other, which didn't sound like much until the same store called back a few days later asking for more. One owner told Malhotra, almost as an aside, that a customer had bought three copies at once — one for himself and two to give away.
It built slower than the first surge had. But it built.
Then something else started happening, something Raghav hadn't advertised at all. A bookstore employee mentioned that a customer had come in asking for "the dinosaur book, the one the kid wrote," without knowing the title. Another store heard the same request almost word for word. People were describing it to each other before they even knew what it was called.
Raghav sat with that for a while. He hadn't put that description on any poster. Somebody had made it up on their own, and it had spread further and faster than anything he'd printed.
His notebook needed new columns after that. Reorder date. Quantity requested. The store data used to be about what had sold. Now it was about what people were asking for before it even ran out.
---
By early June, the ten thousand copies were most of the way gone, and Malhotra's calls had a different tone to them — less "here's how it's going" and more "here's what we need."
"Twenty," Raghav said, when Malhotra finally asked him for a number. He hadn't meant to say it that fast, but it came out before he second-guessed himself.
There was a short pause on the line, and Malhotra just said okay, and that was it. The unit cost dropped again at that volume, down to a dollar eighty a copy, though by then Raghav found he was thinking less about the margin and more about whether Malhotra could actually get twenty thousand books made fast enough. The presses that had once run five thousand copies as an experiment were now running four times that as a straightforward decision about supply.
His mother looked at the invoice later and said, quietly, "That's a lot of books."
"First run was five thousand. Second was ten. This one's twenty," Raghav said, mostly just to hear it out loud himself.
She nodded, and didn't say anything else, and Raghav understood that she wasn't really asking about the number. She was just noticing how far it had come.
---
Through all of it, Raghav kept checking the yen.
Not every day, not obsessively, but often enough that he could feel the number moving even when he wasn't looking directly at it. A hundred forty-five became a hundred forty-six. A hundred forty-six edged toward a hundred forty-seven. He wrote each one down next to the book numbers, two separate columns in the same notebook, two different clocks running at the same time.
Neither one had reached where it needed to be yet. Both were close.
---
The call from a few days ago finally got answered properly a few days into June — not the same call, but the one it had been waiting to become.
It was a distributor, based a few states over, who'd heard about the book through channels Raghav still wasn't entirely sure of. They wanted to talk about carrying it somewhere outside the territory Malhotra already covered.
"We've been hearing things about your book," the man on the phone said.
Raghav didn't say anything about it being a big deal, mostly because he wasn't sure yet whether it was one. "What kind of things?"
"That it's moving faster than anyone expected for something nobody's heard of." A pause. "We'd like to talk about distribution. Somewhere bigger than a few stores a printer already knows."
Raghav told him they'd think about it and get back to him, which was true, and hung up, and sat there for a minute without doing anything else.
He didn't tell his parents it meant they'd made it. He told them someone wanted to talk about getting the book into more stores, which was closer to what had actually happened.
---
By June 13, the second batch was gone. Not almost gone — gone, sold through and accounted for, with the third printing already running at Sunrise.
Raghav sat at his desk that evening with the ledger open, the printing confirmation for twenty thousand copies next to it, and the notebook page where the yen numbers lived.
His father came in and stood in the doorway for a second. "Still up?"
"Just going through the numbers."
"How many books now."
"Second run's sold out. Third one's already printing. Twenty thousand." Raghav said it plainly, the way he'd say any other fact.
His father took that in for a moment, not saying anything.
"And the yen?"
Raghav looked at the last line he'd written. "One forty-seven. A little over."
His father didn't ask what that meant exactly, not the mechanics of it, not the math behind why that specific number mattered. He didn't need to. He just knew his son had been watching it for almost a month now, quietly, the very same way he'd watched everything else that eventually turned out to matter.
Neither of them said much else. Raghav closed the notebook and looked at the calendar on the wall.
June 13.
Just a few days before I can clear my Yen position.
_____
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