The Real Bookstore in My Novel, and the Café I Invented Inside It

On launch night I stood in a bookstore that is in my novel and read from the novel it is in, which is a strange sentence to write. Landmark Booksellers is at 114 East Main Street in Franklin, it is real, and it is in the book by name with the gracious permission of Joel and Carol Tomlin.

Some of what happens there in the book is not real at all. Since I am about to be a guest in the actual building, it seems only decent to be precise about which is which.

What is real

The building. Two stories of Greek Revival wedged between a gift shop and an antique store, the columned façade rising past the awning, the columns cut from solid poplar trunks. The elegantly scripted sign above the door. The window display mixing popular titles with obscure finds, and the second sign taped to the glass in simple, cheerful letters: Dogs Welcome. That one is real, and I have always loved it.

Real inside, too. The bell over the door and its pleasant chime. The cool of the place against a Tennessee July. The smell—paper and cinnamon, as though pages and scones have mingled too long and cannot quite separate anymore. Shelves that are meticulously organized and somehow still feel like a labyrinth: alcoves tucked away, reading chairs positioned as if waiting for secrets, Southern history along one wall, local and regional authors along another, the rare and out-of-print tucked deeper in. Books climb the walls. The floors creak the way old floors should.

What I made up

The Author’s Note puts it in one sentence: the café in these pages, its employees, and the apartment above are products of my imagination; the warmth of the real place is not.

So—there is no café counter at the real Landmark, no espresso machine hissing at the end of the front aisles. There is no black-haired barista named Mandy, quick with a laugh, tossing it across the counter to anyone who will catch it. The apartment above the shop, and whoever is in it, are my invention as well. If you visit and go looking for a latte, this is me telling you in advance that I made it up.

I invented the café for a mechanical reason, which is usually why writers invent anything. Michael Sawyer needs somewhere to sit still. He is fifty-five, out of work, two thousand miles from the life he had, and constitutionally incapable of asking another human being for help. A bookstore is one of the few rooms left in this country where you can stay two hours, buy almost nothing, and never be asked to account for yourself. Add a counter and a latte and he has a reason to come back on Saturdays. Nearly every good thing that happens to him afterward runs through that room.

There is a second category, which is the things about the real store I could not have invented and did not try to. More than thirty-five thousand new, pre-owned, and rare titles. Over two thousand signed first editions. Prices from ten dollars to ten thousand. A specialty in Southern Americana and Tennessee history. And a wall—they call it the Great Wall—holding the finest books ever written in chronological order from antiquity forward. If I had put that in a novel from scratch, an editor would have told me to cut it for being too neat.

A word about permission

Naming a real business in a novel is not a neutral act, and I want to be plain about how it works. I asked. The Tomlins said yes. The copyright page of Jetson’s Journey says that certain real businesses and locations in and around Franklin appear in the book, that a small number of real individuals appear by name with their permission, and that their words, actions, and portrayal are the author’s invention.

That last clause is the important one, and it is the reason this post exists. Nothing anyone says or does inside Landmark in my novel was said or done by a real person who works there. The building is theirs. The warmth is theirs. The plot is mine, and if anything in it embarrasses the store, that is on me.

And the seminar

The Saturday writing seminar is invented, and so is the man who leads it—Patrick Copeland, who left Wall Street not because he failed at it but because success felt like failure when it had nothing to do with who he was. He is the one who tells the room not to worry about perfection and to worry about honesty instead, and that the words you almost delete are the ones you need to keep.

What is not invented is the premise. Landmark genuinely hosts writers—signings most weekends, book clubs, a shelf given over to Williamson County and Middle Tennessee authors, a calendar that turns a bookstore into a meeting place. I put a fictional seminar inside a real store because the real store is already the kind of place where that sort of thing happens. Launch night was the proof.

Launch night

Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 6:30 in the evening, 114 East Main Street, Franklin. I read a little, we talked, and I signed a few. Photos and video from the night are here.

Oh, and you won't want to miss Jetson. He'll be at the event and we will probably let him spend our first thirty minutes together letting him work the crowd. Everyone loves Jetson.

If you have already read the book, come by and ask me a hard question. Somebody always does, and it is always the best twenty minutes of the night. If you have not read the book, that is arguably better; you get the building first and the book second, which is the right order.

Come stand in it. Then go read it.

BUY JETSON’S JOURNEY →

Launch night was Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · Landmark Booksellers · 114 East Main Street, Franklin.

If you want the fuller map of what is real, last week’s walking tour of the novel covers the whole town—and the journey map traces the two thousand miles that got Michael here.