A debut novel about an Ogden quilting group that welcomes two gay men ahead of its biggest competition of the year has climbed to No. 5 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, turning a Salt Lake City lawyer and humor columnist into the unlikely face of a publishing surprise. Eli McCann, 42, wrote “Stitched” after spending years watching his mother’s quilting circle from the sidelines, and the book has now sold nearly 38,000 print copies and gone through three printings.
McCann, who lives in Salt Lake City and writes a humor column for The Salt Lake Tribune in addition to practicing corporate law, spent a little over a year writing the novel, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. The book follows a ladies’ quilting association in Ogden that welcomes two gay men into the fold just before its biggest competition of the year, a premise drawn directly from McCann’s own family. As he told The New York Times, “A lot of my earliest memories are of being with my little sister under a quilt stand, with my mom and her friends sitting around it.”
From Family Dinner Table to the Page
The idea for the novel took shape in 2021, per McCann, during a dinner with his mother when his husband, Skylar, suggested he write a book about the quilting world. McCann’s mother belongs to a group called Common Thread, which she has participated in for 46 years, the Tribune reports. McCann had asked multiple times for permission before he was finally allowed to attend his mother’s quilting group to research the book, sitting in on quilt nights with women mostly in their 70s, 80s and 90s. He also visited a separate quilting group in Medina, New York, while developing the story.
Getting the novel into print was not simple. McCann and his agent sent the manuscript out to publishers for a year, and the book was rejected by at least a couple dozen publishers and editors along the way, the Tribune reports. Publishers and editors who passed on it asked McCann to consider changing the older women, the Utah setting, or adding men or romance to the story. He eventually signed with Torrey House Press, an independent nonprofit publisher based in Salt Lake City that formed in 2010, according to the Times.
A Viral Video and a Surprise Bestseller
The day after signing his contract, McCann began posting storytelling videos on TikTok and Instagram. His first video to gain traction told the story of accidentally driving away in another customer’s car after receiving a loaner vehicle, an incident that had happened about 15 years earlier, per McCann. A later video about his mother’s quilting gossip at dinner went viral across the internet the following morning, per the Tribune’s reporting.
That groundswell helped carry “Stitched” onto two different bestseller lists. The novel debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times paperback list on Sept. 27, becoming Torrey House’s first-ever bestseller, the Times reports. Publishers Weekly separately reported that the book debuted at No. 3 on its own trade paperback bestseller list, selling 20,535 units in that tracking period. The book had been the No. 9 title in the country in its first week on sale in September, according to Publishers Weekly, and by the week of Oct. 26 it had sold almost 38,000 print copies, with weekly sales up 177 percent from the week before.
Sold Out, Printed Again, and Headed to Libraries
Demand has pushed “Stitched” into its third print run, bringing the total print run to 108,000 copies, the outlet’s reporting notes. The book has also been sold into bookstores in all 50 states and is being shelved in 1,000 libraries to date, according to the same report. Torrey House publisher Will Neville-Rehbehn said stories about human connection and community are resonating with readers, and he compared the novel’s trajectory to other sleeper-hit debuts, “The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans and “Theo of Golden” by Allen Levi. A report from KRDO noted that “Stitched” has appeared on the paperback trade fiction bestseller list alongside “Theo of Golden” and “Dungeon Crawler Carl.”
Two days after the book’s release, McCann held an event at Sewtopia, a quilting shop near his home, where roughly 150 quilters turned out. Sewtopia owner Amy presented him with a quilt she had designed based on the book’s cover art. One bookseller described “Stitched” to the Times as “Schitt’s Creek” meets “The Golden Girls,” a comparison that captures the novel’s blend of small-town community and outsider charm.
Why a Quilting Story Struck a Nerve
McCann has said he believes crafts like quilting receive less respect than other pursuits because of misogyny and their perception as women’s hobbies, a view shaped partly by his own decade of knitting. That perspective runs through “Stitched,” which treats a small-town quilting competition with the same stakes and warmth typically reserved for more conventional literary subjects. For a press founded in 2010 that had never landed a bestseller before, the novel’s run on two national lists marks a milestone built on a very local foundation: a Salt Lake City writer, his mother’s decades-old quilting circle, and a story almost no one wanted to publish as written.
