It’s almost midnight and I am supposed to be in bed, asleep. But with all of these thoughts about my book running through my head, all I’m doing is tossing and turning.
The act of writing the book, formatting it, adding in the photos, tweaking the details, editing, proofreading, working with the artwork, and everything else associated to the book has kept my mind busy. But now that the book is done and I am working towards finding a way to market and sell it, I find myself in a place that is very uncomfortable for me..
In my day job, I am an instructor for corporate training classes, usually of a technical nature. But I spend a lot of my non-classroom time working on my materials and tweaking everything as I need to. When it comes time for me to do a class, I just do it without hesitation. I’ve been teaching either in a college or the corporate world for almost 20 years so it comes second nature to me. I’m very confident about what I can do, what I know, and how I deliver my material. New courses can be a little nerve wrecking, but I’m always my own worst critic and I usually find a way to make even those first, nervous classes great.
For my book, I’m looking at an early February release so that means I need to make sure I have all my ducks in a row and have figured out exactly how to sell this thing to people. And that’s where the discomfort comes from.
I have enough friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances around that will probably purchase a book as a means to support me, as well as the sheer curiosity of what that insane trip was all about. It’s the “other” stuff that scares the hell out of me.
When I think about trying to “sell” or make the book marketable to others, I started getting all freaked out by exactly how I am supposed to do this. Thoughts like “well, why WOULD someone I don’t know want to buy this book?”
Plenty of people I know have told me they have enjoyed the things that I have written and would love to read more so this does give me some sense of confidence. But when it comes to actually marketing something like this to others, it just causes my blood pressure to rise and the anxiety starts to set in.
“How am I going to do this?”
“Do I ask people for early reviews? What if they don’t like it?”
“What if people say the book sucks? Does that mean I’m a terrible author?”
“What if I order too many books for me to sell and can’t sell them all? What if I don’t order enough of them?”
“I’m not a social media ‘influencer’ with a ton of followers on social media. Does that mean I can’t get people to be interested in what I do?”
“I love what I wrote and I am proud of what I accomplished. Why am I so freaked out by what others might think?”
Questions like these and many more float around in my head as I try to drift off to sleep. But yet here I am, now sitting here at 12:05AM writing about how I’m obsessing over this stuff.
I am more than confident about my day job, and I know I am not a terrible writer. So why is it so hard to just believe in yourself and go from there?
These are not questions I expect anyone who reads this to answer, but tonite these are the things that are running through my mind.
Thankfully, the sleeping stuff I took has started to kick in and I can go to sleep soon. But I just know that when I get up tomorrow and decide to do more work on this book thing, these questions will hit me again.
Day by day I guess eh?
