Second Act

Essay by Alix Wilber

F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that there are no second acts in American lives. But then he didn't know about e-publishing. 

In 1991, W.W. Norton published my first novel, The Wives' Tale. It was well reviewed; it made back its modest advance; it got translated into German and Dutch; it was republished as a trade paperback; it got optioned a few times by various directors who thought they might like to make a movie out of it (though none of them did). And then, like most books, it gradually faded from view.

By 1997, when I went to work as a literary editor for a little online bookstore called Amazon, The Wives' Tale was out of print. Oh, it led a kind of ghost life in Amazon's catalog where it was listed as "unavailable." Now and then I'd run across a copy or two on the shelves of used book stores--an event that thrilled me since it meant that someone who was probably not my mother had at least owned my book at one point, and maybe even read it.

I bought up these used copies whenever I found them (paying in cash, for fear the cashier might notice the name on the book and the one on the credit card were the same--as if they cared!) because even though the original 25 free copies from my publisher had seemed like a lot at the time, why would anyone need 25 copies of any book, even her own, I had wondered. Unaccountably, over the years, that stock dwindled, and now I was buying myself back at $5.99 a pop.

Years went by. I wrote three more novels and the starts to one or two more, none of which made it any further than the metaphorical bottom drawer on my hard drive. I moved on from Amazon to a literary arts center here in Seattle, and focused my attention on furthering the careers of other writers for eight more years. The Wives' Tale was pretty well forgotten, I thought, by everyone--almost myself, included.

And then electronic publishing happened. And suddenly even long-forgotten little books like mine have second acts. So maybe I’ll write another book some day.