The shelf talker at Paper Lantern Books in Durham, North Carolina, is written in green ink on an index card, and it has been taped and retaped so many times that the corners have gone soft. "If you read one love story this summer, make it the one with the ferns," it says. Beneath it sits a stack of Glasshouse Summer, the debut romance by Imani Clarke. By the store's count, it is the fourth stack since July.
The card belongs to Marisol, a bookseller who read an early copy in May and decided, in her words, "to make it my personal business." The novel follows Nell, a botanist, and Theo, a restoration architect, who spend one summer bringing a ruined Victorian greenhouse back to life. Clarke found her agent, Dana Whitlock of Whitlock Literary, just nine days after sending her first query. The rest of the book's success has been slower and more human, built one reader at a time. We spoke by video as Clarke sat in her sunroom, surrounded by what she called "too many plants for a responsible adult."
Where the Greenhouse Came From
Where did the idea for Glasshouse Summer start?
In a conservatory, on a rainy afternoon, with a broken umbrella. I ducked into an old glasshouse at a botanical garden to get out of the weather and stayed for three hours. Half the panes had been replaced, and you could see which ones were original because the glass had a faint wave in it. I thought, somebody fixed this one pane at a time, and somebody loved it enough to bother. That's a romance.
You found your agent in nine days. What was that like?
Surreal. I had budgeted for a year of rejections. I had a spreadsheet ready and everything. Dana wrote back on a Tuesday asking for the full manuscript and called me the following Thursday. I was on my lunch break sitting in my car, and I made her repeat herself twice.
The Bookseller Effect
The book's release in June was fairly quiet. When did things change?
When Marisol read it. I didn't know her. I still hadn't met her when she'd already sold something like eighty copies. A friend of a friend texted me a photo of her shelf card, and I cried in a grocery store parking lot. She put it in the hands of every person who walked in asking for "something with a happy ending."
Why do you think one bookseller made that much difference?
Because people trust a person more than they trust an ad. When Marisol hands you a book, she's staking her reputation on it. And readers came back and told her whether she was right. That's a relationship, and relationships are the whole point of romance.
"When Marisol hands you a book, she's staking her reputation on it."
How did the book club come in?
One of Marisol's regulars runs a club called the Seedling Society. It's twelve women, most of them retired, who meet on the last Sunday of the month. They picked it for July and invited me. They had annotated their copies with little tabs in different colors. One woman had drawn a floor plan of the greenhouse in the back of hers. They argued for forty minutes about whether Theo deserved Nell. I've never been happier to be the subject of a fight.
Then social media picked it up. What did that feel like from the inside?
Like watching weather. A member of the Seedling Society had a granddaughter who posted a short video flipping through her grandmother's tabbed copy. It got shared a lot, and suddenly I had messages from readers in places I'd never been. But I always tell people the video only worked because a bookseller and a book club had already done the hard part. The internet showed up late to a party that was already going.
What Romance Readers Know
What have romance readers taught you since publication?
That they are the most careful readers alive. They notice everything. One reader wrote to tell me the orchid Nell repots in chapter nine couldn't survive in that humidity. She was right. Romance readers also taught me that a happy ending is a promise, and you'd better keep it. They trust you with their hearts for three hundred pages. You don't get to be careless with that.
What comes next?
Another restoration, this time a lighthouse. Different couple, same stubbornness. And I'm doing a reading at Paper Lantern in October. Marisol and I have finally met. She hugged me before she said hello.
Clarke still keeps the photo of that first green index card on her phone. When the writing gets hard, she says, she looks at it and remembers that a book can travel a long way on one person's word.
Glasshouse Summer by Imani Clarke (Rosewater, 352 pages, $18.99) is out now.
Features writer. Marcus reports on publishing, independent bookstores and how new authors break through.
