By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Parents usually feel a sense of wonder and accomplishment at the landmark first birthday of their child. The feeling is not much different when an author celebrates the one-year anniversary of a book’s publication, especially if it is the author’s first book.
One year ago—on August 21, 2021—Paraclete Press published my first book, Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks . The book talks about my days growing up at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, a Trappist monastery in Huntsville, a small town in rural Northern Utah.
I started writing the book when I learned the monastery would close in 2017. The abbey had too many old monks and too few young monks. I wanted people to remember the Trappists I knew and loved.
It is an audacious ask, to seek to publish a book. There are many thousands of writers trying to break into the business each year. Only about 1% of manuscripts submitted to publishers are accepted. And believe it or not, selling and marketing books can be as hard as publishing them.
In 2020, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (BK) reported that in the United States, the average book sold less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime. The BK report noted, “A book has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.”
Publishers Weekly (PW) provided similar data a few years earlier noting that 950,000 titles of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. PW said another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies and only 25,000 books sold more than 5,000 copies.
I’ve been lucky. With Monastery Mornings we have beaten the sales averages and the odds. We won the League of Utah Writers Gold Quill award as best nonfiction book in 2022.
Monastery Mornings is in several libraries, available online, and sold in many bookstores. Locally, this includes The King’s English and Magdalene Religious Goods in Salt Lake City, Immaculate Heart store in Draper, Dolly’s Books in Park City, Pioneer Books in Provo, and St. Mary’s Church store in West Haven. It’s even in the gift shop of the History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Yes, I did write the book and it was a lot of difficult work, and I have worked hard to market and publicize it, but I think it’s the topic—the beloved Utah monks—that accounts for the success.
So, what can one say on such a wonderful anniversary? I don’t really know, so I researched how other authors have reacted to their debut publications.
“I’m a late bloomer,” the 66-year-old Frank McCourt told the New York Times after publishing the mournful memoir Angela’s Ashes in 1996. Watership Down author Richard Adams, a housing and local government employee for many years, has said, “I never thought of myself as a writer until I became one.”
A recent biography about J.D. Salinger explains how the reclusive author “spent 10 years writing The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his life regretting it” because of the unwanted attention it brought him. In contrast, soon after To Kill a Mockingbird appeared, Harper Lee supposedly said, only half-jokingly, “All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
In Monastery Mornings, I write about Trappist monks, as did famous Trappist Thomas Merton in his first book, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton had a delightful and an authentically human reaction as his publication date neared. The Kentucky Trappist monk mused with some friends that perhaps the famous actor Gary Cooper would play him in a movie version. A dozen years later, when Cooper’s daughter wrote Merton and explained how the monk’s writings had comforted her dying father in his final days, Merton wrote her back and confessed his immodest “temptation” (see more in: My cover story, co-starring Thomas Merton).
I can identify with Merton’s publication excitement. Yet, I would never dare to do something like imagine Gary Cooper playing me in the film version of Monastery Mornings. Bradley Cooper maybe, but never Gary.
One year later, I think the best thing about writing/publishing Monastery Mornings has been the chance to talk to all sorts of people from many different backgrounds about the Utah Trappist monks. I have spoken in bookstores, churches, libraries, classrooms, auditoriums, living rooms, grand entrance halls, holiday bazaars, county fairs, social halls, hallways, cemetery grounds, on radio shows, at zoom book club meetings, and many other interesting places.
And I do not do all the talking. People have told me they loved the monks’ bread and honey, of course, that they were great farmers and ranchers, and that they were kind and gentle men.
Yet, folks also have poured their hearts out to me, usually while wiping away tears, about how they found peace on the abbey grounds, or how the monks helped them deal with problems or addictions, helped their kids, saved their marriage, changed their lives, or even kept them from starving.
It’s a remarkable legacy for a remarkable place. It has been a blessing to tell just a small part of this history, and in turn to hear back many more stories about the love Utah’s Trappist monks gave to pretty much everyone who met them.
So Happy First Birthday, Monastery Mornings, and thank you! It’s your one-year anniversary celebration, but I am the one who got the gift.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021 and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
