My debut novel, Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo, was published five years ago this week, on March 1, 2016.
A lot has happened since then.
When I first got my publishing deal I thought — honestly — that no one would read it. Well, I thought my mom and her book club would read it, but that was about it. After all, the average book sells less than 500 copies.
But that’s not what happened. It all started with that rave NYT Review the Sunday before publication, and it never stopped. When my husband and I sold our condo in LA to go on book tour, we thought it would last for a few months, but our journey on the road to do book events lasted for years (until last March, of course, because it’s hard to live out of your local Marriott during a global pandemic).
I’ve now seen Oil and Marble translated into six foreign languages:
(L to R, Top to Bottom: Portuguese, Turkish, Slovakian, Czech, Spanish, Russian)
And the brilliant producers at Pioneer Pictures are busy developing it as a feature film (more on that soon we hope). AND of course, last year, Oil and Marble got a baby brother in my second novel, Raphael, Painter in Rome — who is out there taking over the world now, himself.
One of the best experiences of becoming a novelist has been meeting all of these other brilliant novelists out there. We come together at conferences, festivals, virtual happy hours… These other writers — you know who you are — make my world brighter through their books and their tireless passion for their work.
But most importantly are the thousands of readers I’ve met on the road, at virtual events, on social media, and in my email inbox. I am forever changed by the readers who tell me that Oil and Marble is one of their favorite books, or that they’ve read it—and re-read it!—while traveling through Italy, or that it gave them a better appreciation of the art, or that it helped them mentally escape to another time and place when they needed to escape…
I’ve heard some people argue that writers have a responsibility to create without their audience in mind. They say, “Be true to yourself, don’t worry about your reader or it will destroy your ability to be creative.” But if I only cared about myself, I wouldn’t publish my novels; I would put them into my filing cabinet. Performers wouldn’t rent theaters to put on shows and filmmakers wouldn’t get distribution for their films, musicians would only sing in their cars, painters wouldn’t ever fresco a single wall of a single church…
No, all art — whether book, painting, sculpture, movie, TV show, photograph, song — is MADE to be consumed by other people.
It is the audience that matters.
In books, it's actually not about the author AT ALL. It’s about the connection the reader makes with the imaginary characters who come to life inside of those pages.
So thank you, to all of you who are fans of my versions of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael. YOU make these books worth writing.
And yes, that means you are making another one worth writing, too, so I’d better get back to novel #3…