How 3,000 Copies of My Book Found Their Way from the Trash Bin to the #1 Spot on the Amazon Kindle Bestseller List

The story of how Wild Child, one of my first novels, was published is almost as wild as the story itself.

The idea for the book came to me in a dream.   I started madly writing it down the next morning, and  couldn’t stop.  In 40 days of frenzied typing at the keyboard, I finished the entire book.

The first literary agent I sent it to was Laura Rennert, at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency in Manhattan.  She loved it.  Laura sent it out to three of the biggest YA publishers.  They loved it, too.  I was thrilled—my very first YA book, and I had already found an agent and willing publishers.  My baby was about to be read by thousands, and perhaps millions, of people.   It was a dream come true.

“But,” she told me on the phone, “there’s one problem with your book.”

“What’s that?” I said, my euphoria fading.

“It’s too short.  Can you add another fifteen thousand words?”

Fifteen thousand more words?  I was dumbfounded.  I didn’t understand why I had to add 15,000 words to a book that seemed perfect as it was.

“It has to do with the cost of paper,” Laura explained, "and retail price points, and so on.  It’s complicated.”

I spent the next two months struggling to make Wild Child a longer book.  Nothing about the process felt right to me, but I like most writers, I badly wanted to see it published.  When I finally finished padding it with all the extra words, I gave the manuscript to all my friends and trusted readers to read again.  “Mike,” one of them said, “congratulations! You totally ruined a really great book.”

Unfettered, I started packing up the manuscript to send to Laura.  But at the last moment, I changed my mind.  Why should I add 15,000 words to a book that seems perfect just as it is, just because of some rules about the cost of paper and cardboard boxes?  Would an artist make a finished painting three inches bigger on all sides to make it fit into someone's frame?  To hell with the big publishers, I thought—I’ll publish Wild Child myself, in its original form.

I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time.  As I needed a book cover designed, I decided to hold a city-wide student art contest for the best cover illustration.  After all, Wild Child was a story about young people, written for young people—why not have young people come up with the cover picture?

The winning illustration came from a 17 year old at North Atlanta High School, a laid-back African American by the name of Seron Fuller.  Everyone agreed that his amazing, magical illustration for Wild Child perfectly captured the main characters, Kyle and Brianna, and the overall feeling of the story.

I excitedly arranged for 3,000 copies of the book to be printed with Seron’s cover illustration on the front, investing my own money in the project.  Then, as fate would have it, my work situation changed.  Within a week of the books being delivered to my apartment, I moved across the Atlantic, to Europe, to Riga, Latvia.

Printed books are heavy.  I could only afford to take two boxes of Wild Child with me—200 books, total.  I shipped the rest up to Nashville, to my parents’ garage.  My stepfather wasn’t too happy about keeping them for me, as they took up a lot of space, but he grudgingly agreed to do it “for a while.”

I settled in Latvia and began my job, teaching at a Latvian university.   My wife is also a teacher was working at a local high school.  One day she said, “Mike, I told our English teacher that you were a young adult writer and she wanted her students to read Wild Child.  Can you spare a few copies?”

Why not? I thought.  They’re just sitting here in a box, collecting dust.  So I gave five copies to my wife to pass along to the teacher.  A few weeks later, the teacher asked for five more copies.  And five more.  Then an English teacher at another Latvian school became interested, and I gave out more copies.  And the book began to spread.

In short, hundreds high school students in Latvia went crazy over Wild Child.  I had soon given away half my copies to schools and libraries.

Meanwhile, my stepfather had contacted me several times, asking me when I was going to get all the damn books out of his garage.  I investigated shipping them all to Latvia, but the cost was astronomical.  Finally, backed into a corner, I said, “Just have them recycled, I don’t know what else to do with them.”  It killed me to tell him this, but what choice did I have?  None of my American friends wanted 28 huge boxes of books taking up spaces in their garages.

To add insult to injury, my stepfather called me back the next day.  “Mike, it will cost two hundred dollars to have these books hauled off for recycling.”  Two hundred dollars!  I had to pay to have my precious babies thrown into the trash!

I gritted my teeth and sent him the check.

More time passed.  I soon had given away all 200 of the books I’d brought with me to Latvia.  I sorely regretted having the others hauled away.

One day I ran into a student who had read Wild  Child in his English class--he recognized me from my photo from the back cover of the book.  He asked if I had any more copies.  I told him, with pang in my heart, that no more copies existed.

“You’re wrong,” he said.  “They’re selling your book on Amazon.com.”

I blinked once.  “That’s impossible,” I told him.  “All the copies I had in the United States were thrown in the trash.”

He shrugged.  “See for yourself.”

Certain that he was mistaken, I went home and pulled up the Amazon website.  Lo and behold, there it was.  Wild Child, by Mike Wells.  The book wasn’t available from Amazon directly, but from a half dozen of their U.S. resellers.

Somebody had pulled all those copies out of the trash and started selling them!

Was this yet another sign that the book needs to be read?  I certainly thought so.

Not long thereafter, I moved to the UK and started teaching in the University of Oxford Creative Writing Program.  Last year I watched the explosion of ebooks and reading devices, such as the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Stanza, etc..  It seems like everywhere I went, someone was reading a book on one of those gadgets, or an iPad smart phone or notebook computer.

I decided that Wild Child’s time had finally come.  Publishing the story as an ebook was perfect!  Ebooks don’t have any physical form—they can be as long or short as they need to be.

I converted Wild Child to ebook form for the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony,  etc.  and of course the iPad and all  the other Apple devices.  Young adult book bloggers started reviewing it and the book has received great reviews.  In July of 2011 it climbed to the #3 spot on in the Young Adult/Juvenile category on the Amazon USA Kindle Books Bestseller list, and in September of 2011 hit the #1 spot in Children's Fiction on the Amazon UK Kindle Bestseller List.

I have to say that I feel 100% better about myself now that I'm actually helping Wild Child find its way into the world.

Sometimes I think that Wild Child should have a subtitle:  The Book That Wouldn't Die.


NOTE (April, 2012):  The 3,000 copies I threw in the trash have become collector's items—the current price in the UK for an original copy of Wild Child, unsigned, is £78.87, or about $125.00!