Greetings!
Well, I’m one full week in from my launch of Minutemen: World When We Live, and so far, it’s been a better launch than my first book in the series. Things have gone pretty much like I was told through those I’ve learned from–through podcasts and classes. One great side-effect of launching a book in a series is the uptick of downloads in the previous books in that series. When I read that might happen, at first I thought, “no way. The sales of that first book have run their course, haven’t they?”
But this past week, sales for the first book have gone through the roof, approaching 2000 copies, and making Minutemen #1 in its category in Amazon (for a brief time, but still…) and is still having 20 -30 downloads per day. This is awesome, but ultimately disappointing if no one writes a review after they’ve finished reading, or, perhaps more important, no one says, “Wow! I need to see how this continues.” And picks up the new book after they finish the first one. This brings up the subject of my post, because in a couple weeks, I’m going to get a measurement of just how good (or not so good) my writing is.
I get a few comments from folks how lucky I would be if I’m able to turn my writing into something I can do full time–providing enough financial return to support my family. “Because then you can quit work and just not work for the rest of your life.”
Except that writing is work. Forget everything else that goes along with this for a moment: The preparation of ads to promote the book, the scheduling of your book with services like Freebooksy or BookBub to coincide with your book launch, informing your fans the book is out–and before that, going through multiple drafts to edit the book, designing or commissioning a cover–set all that aside for a moment. The singular act of writing, writing a story or book, is work. It could drain you. Daily.
So when all that is done, and you set it out into the world, it’s only natural to think “is it good enough? Will people enjoy it?” And then you look at authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown, John Grisham, and you think, “well, no way I’m as good as they are. What the heck am I doing?”
What are you doing?
You’re writing. You’re working. And like everyone else, you just want to make sure you’re doing a good job.