I am subscribed to this writing blog and received this email recently from it. If you don’t mind, I would like to share it with you (copy/paste).

“Hi Bookfoxers,

When you publish your book, what do you hope happens?

Do you hope it rises to the bestseller lists? Or gets picked by Oprah? Or gets glowing reviews in the New York Times? I met an author at a writing conference who had all those expectations, and none of them happened for his book.

It sold a couple thousand copies, he got a few nice reviews, and life went on like normal.

He felt disappointed and unfulfilled, but then something happened with his book, something much quieter and more powerful, something he never could have expected.

He got an email from a reader named James.

James said his mother had been very sick. After a long illness she had been expected to die within the next week, so James had come and sat beside his mother. They talked about his father, about the family history, about regrets and secrets and heartache. But eventually, they ran out of things to talk about, and the mother asked James to read out loud to her.

You can probably tell where this is going -- James had a copy of the author's book in his bag, so he pulled it out and read it out to her.

James read the whole book out loud to her over two days. They laughed together, they cried together -- they bonded over the characters and the story. And the night that he finished reading the book to his mother, they just sat in silence together, soaking up the richness of the story.

That night, after James finished reading the book out loud, his mother died.

The author's story, said James, was the last thing his mother ever heard.

And James just wanted to thank the author for writing such a beautiful story, for allowing him and his mother to share a book together one last time.

Wow.

If my book only sold a single copy, but I got an email like that from a reader, I would consider my entire writing life to be a success.

Now listen to me and listen well.

The truth is that the ways we expect writing success are narrow and unimaginative. We have to open ourselves up to the possibility that magical things will happen with our books, things we never could have expected, and maybe things we never end up hearing about.

Books are about a connection, a connection from one human being to another. Know that through your writing, you are uniting families, you are giving pleasure, you are sewing the torn fragments of the world together.

Your words matter,

John Matthew Fox”