I rarely pay attention to how my books are selling; popularity was never the point of producing them (although both my publisher and I are pleased when they do well).
That said, this past September Sowing the Seed of Truth: Orthodox Quaker Sermons of Murray Shipley (1873-1876) came out in hardcover, so I sent an email announcement about that to the acquisitions librarians at several hundred colleges and universities with religious studies programs, hoping that their students or staff might be interested. The announcement included a link to sample pages from the book. One day I decided to check my WordPress statistics and was delighted to note that visits to that site had jumped to seventy-three. (For perspective, they’re normally in the single digits.) I have no idea how many people decided to buy the book based on what they read, but it was very encouraging that they at least wanted to check it out!
Today, on a lark, I decided to see if there was any other buzz out there in the vast expanse of the Internet, and saw two items that hadn’t crossed my radar before. One was that the QuakerBooks of FGC website featured Sowing the Seed of Truth among the works that had been reviewed in Friends Journal.
The other mention took me more by surprise: the book was listed among those available from BookShop West Portal, a locally owned independent bookstore in San Francisco—quite a distance from the Cincinnati enclave where Murray lived and preached. Do they actually have the book on their shelves, or is it just one of many books that its clients can order? I don’t care deeply; I just appreciate that there’s one more venue where people can become aware of this nineteenth-century Quaker minister and the messages he shared with the world.
Sabrina Darnowsky 
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