After eight years of writing, nurturing, and fussing over my first novel, primping it and reminding it to behave, today it enters the big wide world. I’m incredibly proud of this grown-up book and I’m getting a little teary-eyed watching it leave home.

One might expect that today, its official release date, would be its birthday, but it doesn’t feel that way. The book was conceived in 2007 with a germ of an idea, born in late 2014 when the first advance reader copies were released, and today it flies. It has its own life now and I can’t protect it any more.

What’s even more terrifying, though, is that I’m in charge of promoting it. Whose idea was this, anyway? Oh yeah, mine.

Could this task have fallen to a more unlikely person?

I was telling my sister Madeline the other day how I have a booksigning at COAS Books in Las Cruces, NM, on July 25. Before I could say another word, she said, “Wear a statement necklace, something large and unforgettable, and a plain black dress. Wear that necklace at all your signings. You’ll need an obvious image that people associate with you.”

When I mentioned to my niece Theadora that today was the release date, she said, “Come with me—you need a photo. Wear this. Sit there. Hold the books this way. Are you happy about the book? Then show it.” Click, click, done.

A few nights ago, while celebrating the book’s imminent release with old friends, all of whom bought a copy, Eileen called out across the bar, “My friend here just wrote a book!” People raised their glasses and the bartender bought me a beer. I slinked away to the rest room. When I returned, Deirdre handed me $30 and said,  “Those people over there just bought two books!” No more sold for the rest of the night because, you know, I was in charge.

Clearly my family and friends are more natural marketers than I am. And clearly, this needs to change.

Some time ago while cleaning my house, I discovered a spider living under a potted plant. “What is your problem?” I scolded as it scuttled away from the sudden light. “How do you expect to make a living here? You expect a mosquito to crawl under this thing and snare itself in your web? You expect a volunteer fly to zip by? Haven’t you ever heard of market positioning?” It wasn’t interested.

I’m trying really hard not to be that stupid spider, but it’s hard going against your own nature. Being an extrovert isn’t the same as tooting your own horn. And most writers tend to be observers—we might be chatty, but we generally like to hang back some; schmoozing too much interferes with that. The famously reclusive J.D. Salinger had no Pinterest boards, we all know that Jonathan Franzen hates the internet, and I assume that my heroes Annie Proulx and Toni Morrison employ their own crack publicists. But last time I checked, I’m not quite as well known as those folks.

But this is serious. The book I’m launching today, Love and Death in a Perfect World, must succeed, or why would I bother writing it? You don’t send a kid to college just so she can hole up in a dorm room and sleep for four years. It’s time for this book to make its way in the world. So here goes.

Love and Death in a Perfect World is available today on Amazon. It’s a great book, a book that will make you wonder why you think what you think and feel what you feel. A book that, through an authentic portrait of a woman named Rosemary, explores the baffling gift of life, the mystery of love, and the burden of death. It will make you laugh and cry.

But don’t take my word for it. Buy it. Request it at your local bookstore—it’s available to them through Ingram—or buy it on Amazon.

And let me know what you think!

I’ve often joked that if any of us are ever struck with amnesia and forget even our own names, we can just do a Google search and look at the ads that pop up for a clue to our identities: Oh yeah, I’m a middle-aged woman who lives in Santa Fe and I could stand to lose some belly fat. Now I remember.

But once you tell the interwebs a little more about yourself, like you just published a book, then the ads and the suggested posts and pins and tweets get more and more focused. I’ve shared some of the items that come my way because it seemed the thing to do: Umberto Eco, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and a host of other heavyweights have plenty to say about writing, and who am I to ignore their wisdom? No prob—I’ll pass it on.

But what about the other stuff? The funny thing is, these customized book-related ads and posts have even less to do with me than does the “Santa Fe Mom” who wants to tell me about the “5 Foods to Never Eat.” (If you don’t see that ad every time you launch Google, then you must be young, male, and/or very fit.)

Here’s the thing: I’m a writer and I love books, but not in the way the search engines and social media platforms assume I do.

First, I don’t need any bookcases, so the American Home Furniture ads can just shut up about it. To me, a great book is like a great meal—far better when shared. To a large degree, my favorite books are the ones I don’t own anymore because I’ve passed them on to other passionate readers.

Second, although I’m always reading, I am the worst, the absolute worst person in the world, when it comes to reading the hottest new books. It’s not that I’m not interested in what’s new—I can spend hours in my favorite bookstore, Collected Works in downtown Santa Fe, admiring well-designed covers and skimming jacket blurbs and standing riveted as I read passages from whatever book my hand just touched. I do my best not to crack the spines as I ogle their wonderfulness, wishing I could take every one home.

But I’m also a busy, distracted, and sort of oblivious person. I wear clothes that haven’t been in style since the first Obama administration—or maybe even the first Bush administration. I forget I’m supposed to hate my kitchen cabinets because whitewashed maple hasn’t been it since 1990. I don’t have time to want things like Pandora bracelets. And although I probably shouldn’t admit it, I read in the same way.

In addition to the young beauties that woo me at Collected Works, I also love wallflower books—the overlooked novels of otherwise-famous writers, odd paperbacks that friends lend me, books that emerging authors ask me to review, lovingly worn books I find at garage sales, books that jump out at me in the library, and the classics I never got around to reading in college, which are anything but young and freshfaced. Sure, new books thrill me, but in truth, I’m a pretty democratic, equal-opportunity reader—nearly all books thrill me.

So when I finally get my author pages set up on Kindred Readers and Goodreads and I begin to build my “bookshelf,” it might not look as zippy and fashionable as one might expect. Think of it as a place where you can enter and relax, where books are not judged by their covers or by their reviews on Amazon. This isn’t high school, after all, where worth is so often judged by looks and popularity. This will be the real, adult world, a place where books of all stripes can be loved and appreciated for who they truly are.