A LETTER FROM A FIRST-TIME NOVELIST
By Harry Cheadle

Dear Reader,
	I am writing this letter in the hope you are a Reader. The Reader is an endangered species today, despite our high literacy rate, and despite the hundreds or thousands of books published and read each year. All Readers read, but not all of those who read are Readers. If you read books solely for information's sake, if you exclusively buy books sold at the supermarket, if you own multiple self-help books, above all if magazines form more than half of your reading consumption, you are likely not a Reader, but merely someone who can read. You are literate and not literary. There isn't anything wrong with that, but this letter isn't addressed to you, so unless you take pleasure in other people's mail, kindly put it down.
	Now that the non-Readers have left, I can confide to you that I hate those guys. Because they have the gift of literacy, a gift granted to very few people historically, they can hear any story, take in any play, discover any idea that humanity has dreamed of in its long years of thought, and they, these non-Readers, these schmucks, use it to figure out what they want to order off of the McDonald's Value Menu. These are the kind of people who, when you tell them you're reading War and Peace, say, "Wow, I heard that is really long! How are you going to get through it?" You don't need those people hanging around. You appreciate love and beauty and ugliness and squalor. You like a good view of the night sky, and you don't care what anyone tells you about supernovae and the speed of light and the size of the universe. The size of the universe, for you, is big enough. You read books on the bus and miss your stop, you stay up all night reading for the sake of a good ending, you peer over other people's shoulders to find out what they are reading and to see if it's any good. You have fallen in love with someone just because they are reading a dog-eared copy of your favorite book. You go into libraries for the smell alone. You read good books without being forced to by an English teacher. You are a Reader.
	And it's because you are a Reader - here we are coming to the part where I tell you why I wrote you - that I am writing you. I need a favor. I need you to buy my book.
	Now, I know you have a lot on your plate; as one of the last Readers on a planet, you are part of the rapidly shrinking market for serious, literary fiction. Or even semi-serious literary fiction. Writers write books for Readers, and we don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, because we're all Readers too. But for a Reader, reading all the great books that come out can be a monumental task - an impossible task, because before you're finished with one book, you see a new one you'll have to read, and remember two others you've been meaning to get to, and three more will get recommended to you by friends. The stack of books to read never diminishes; in fact, as you discover more authors and more books are written, it rises higher and higher, and I understand.
	Nevertheless, I really think you'll like my book. It's sad in some parts, funny in others, strangely touching throughout. It is not sentimental -  it avoids sentimentality like the plague - but it deals with resonant, emotional subjects heart-wrenchingly but unsympathetically, so that you don't know whether to laugh or cry. And that's just the first chapter. The dialogue is realistic but also witty. The characters are well-drawn, rounded characters with fully realized emotion, and throughout the story your feelings change as more facts are revealed. The ending is both melancholy and uplifting. When you finish the book, you will feel that you have just gone on a long autumn walk, crunching through the leaves on the ground, and then returned home to a nice cup of tea. It is long enough to give a sense of accomplishment after finishing it, but not long enough to scare a prospective reader off, the font is extremely readable, and there are a couple of very good sex scenes buried in there.
	I know there are other books out there, books that might even be better than mine. But you don't know those authors like you know me. Did Philip Roth write you a letter asking you to buy his book? No? Then why are you buying it? By writing you a letter, I'm establishing a dialogue between the two of us. If you want to write me a letter back (after buying my book, of course) to tell me what you liked and didn't liked about the book, or if you just want to talk about books or life or just say hi, you are certainly welcome to. Let's be more than Writer and Reader -- let's be friends. Remember, friends buy all each other's books. Sometimes, a friend even buys more than one copy to show support for the other friend.
	Believe me, I need all the support I can get. A common myth is that writers and artists do not really need money, that we are focused on lofty goals and concepts, but I am here to tell you that I need money. I need rent money, money for food, money for beer, money for books, money for cigarettes...it all adds up. Right now I'm writing in a filthy apartment with an empty fridge, a broken stove, and an ever-expanding roach population. Poverty may be ennobling, but it sucks. Don't let anyone tell you different. I work menial jobs, I sell what stories I can, I mooch off my parents, I practice my award acceptance speech in the shower. What I would like most is to retire to a hidden cabin in the deep woods, where I can obsesses over words in peace, chase curious fans and journalists off with a shotgun (what I would give to have fans to hide from), release a novel every decade or so, and secretly circulate rumors of an unreleased masterpiece. I want to spend my last days fishing, or maybe just sitting by the water, and when I die I want to go out quietly, so that for weeks no one notices, until the trustworthy local who brings me groceries every month finds me slumped in my chair, a computer screen in front of me with an uncompleted game of solitaire on it. "Even in death he was a true procrastinator," they'll say about me. But I digress.
	To reach my goal, I need you to buy my books. Make no mistake, you buying the book is just as important as me writing it, if not more important. Without Readers there are no Writers; your reading fuels my authorial spirit, your money fuels my car.
	By buying my book, by the way, you are doing a lot more than buying my book. You are investing in my career; and you can brag about it later. Twenty years from now, when my new comes out (by then, my books will be numerous and well-known), during a conversation about literature, you can say with a sniff, "Harry Cheadle? I remember reading his first book. I liked him better back then." Won't that be cool? Isn't that worth the cover price?
	I don't care what you do to my book after you buy it. As a Reader, you know instinctively the best way to take care of a book. Sometimes, this means putting it on the shelf and age it like a fine wine until its pages turn a musty yellow. Sometimes, it means folding over the pages and circling the good bits. Sometimes, taking care of a book means to give it away or lose it after the relationship becomes stale. It rarely means keeping the book fresh and pristine. Whatever you want to do to my book, you can. That is the beauty of buying a book; once you buy it, it is no longer my book but yours. It ceases to have anything to do with me, and it may end up meaning a great deal for you. This process is beautiful, this transference from the artist to the art viewer, from the Writer to the Reader, it binds us together as having this book between us, it links us, and it is far more meaningful when the book in question is a hardcover and not a paperback.

With all the love, gratitude, admiration, etc.
Harry Cheadle

PS - No, you can't borrow it from the library. That isn't the same thing at all.