The Outcast Now A Bestseller!

The Outcast Now A Bestseller!

As you know from my post, The Truth Behind Book Signings, the author life is not always easy.

This past week, however, something happened. I don’t know if the social media galaxies aligned, or if all those midnight, let-me-pay-back-my-advance prayers went beyond the ceiling. But things started rolling on Sunday and didn’t really stop all week.

On Sunday, The Outcast was featured in the portfolio section of The Tennessean.

On Monday, an article in Christian Retailing caught my eye: “Joel Rosenberg holds two spots on ECPA Christian Bestselling List.”

Rosenberg is a fellow Tyndale author, so I clicked on the link, read through the list, and almost passed out:

Top 10 Fiction titles: 1. The Tattered Quilt, Wanda E. Brunstetter (Barbour Publishing); 2. The Harbinger, Jonathan Cahn (FrontLine/Charisma House Book Group); 3. The Last Jihad, “Last Jihad” No. 1, Rosenberg (Tyndale); 4. The Outcast, Jolina Petersheim (Tyndale); 5. Rosemary Cottage, “Hope Beach” No. 2, Colleen Coble (Thomas Nelson); 6. The Twelfth Imam, “The Twelfth Imam” No. 1, Rosenberg (Tyndale); 7. The Letters, “The Inn at Eagle Hill” No. 1, Suzanne Woods Fisher (Revell/Baker Publishing Group); 8. Trapped, “Private Justice” No. 2 (Bethany House/Baker Publishing Group); 9. A Lineage of Grace, Francine Rivers (Tyndale); and 10. The Living Room, Robert Whitlow (Thomas Nelson).

Further investigation revealed that, for September 2013, The Outcast is #19 in Christian Booksellers Association and actually tied with Wanda Brunstetter, who is an Amish fiction veteran!

Some of the first acronyms that started getting thrown around when I entered this publishing world a year and a half ago was ABA and CBA. After a quick Google search, I understood that ABA stands for American Booksellers Association; CBA stands for Christian Booksellers Association. The Outcast is mainly marketing toward CBA, so the fact that it’s reached #19 just two months after its release is a pretty big deal. And now I can add bestseller to the title; to say this is a dream come true is an understatement!

If you’re reading this right now, you are someone who has made this goal possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

On Tuesday, while my dear husband took our seventy-six pound Akita pup to get spayed (bless his heart), I did a phone interview with WJTL in Lancaster. That night, I got an email from my cousin who lives in Pennsylvania; she was taking her children to school when she heard the interview!

Wednesday, no doubt, was the icing on the cake. Amazon selected The Outcast as their Romance Kindle Daily Deal. To help spread the word, I hosted a giveaway celebration on my Facebook author page.

The support of my family, friends, readers, and fellow authors just floored me. I was cooking supper that night when my agent sent me an email with this subject line: “#19! So fun!”

He normally doesn’t send emails that are cryptic, so I looked at my Amazon page and discovered that, on August 28th at 5:30 p.m., The Outcast was #19 in all of Amazon’s Kindle store!

By the next morning, Ira Wagler, NYT Bestselling Author of Growing Up Amish, sent me a Facebook message and said that The Outcast was #4 in the Kindle store, even after it was back up to full price. He told me to take a picture, so I did. 🙂

That day, I was honored to do a guest post on Women’s Fiction Writers, which was founded by The Glass Wives author Amy Sue Nathan.

Here is an excerpt from my post; I’d love if you’d join in on the conversation about a woman’s role in an Old Order Mennonite community!

Though I’m Mennonite only by heritage, my entire life I’ve come into contact with the Old Order Mennonite and Amish communities. My family moved from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when I was three years old, but my transplanted childhood remained firmly attached to our Mennonite roots. I believe my parents found solace in finding a community that reminded us that, though we were fourteen hours away from home, we were not alone in this foreign Tennessee land.

The Outcast’s fictional story, a modern retelling of The Scarlet Letter set in an Old Order Mennonite community in Tennessee, is not based on any event that transpired in this community we used to visit when I was child. However, I saw enough heartache there to know that the Gentle People struggle with the fallibility of man as much as the Englisch. I will not go into details to protect the innocent party, but the family we used to visit was fatherless. He was not allowed to step foot on the property, which he couldn’t if he had wanted to. He was in prison.

On Friday, I was interviewed by Nashville-based magazine called FamilyFiction. You can read the article by flipping to page 22.

And then, of course, on Saturday I rediscovered mouse droppings in the hatch of my Subaru, even though I had humanely released three baby mice, vacuumed and sanitized the entire vehicle for hours the previous week (don’t know how they got in or what they were living on — stray Cheerios and beads of box juice?).

Sticky traps weren’t cutting it.

So my husband went up to the grocery and hardware store for cheese and traps. This morning, still in my bathrobe, I went outside to check. Sure enough, a fat little mouse was DOA on the floorboard next to my daughter’s seat. I flung that sucker into the woods and hollered with joy!

Life is good about keeping us balanced….

Have a great week, y’all!