Self Publishing Requires Self Confidence

Hellp.  Ha, I meant to write Hello, but maybe hellp is better.  It more accurately reflects how I feel right now.  I have been putting off blogging because I was asked some questions about self publishing, I told people to follow my blog, ( I have no idea whether they did or not) and now I feel obligated to sound like an expert and write things that will help people.

But here’s the thing, I’m not an expert – I’m going in fairly blind here, and I don’t know what I’m doing at all.  But I’m determined that this is going to happen.  This book – Someotherville, which I do love and which so many of my friends and family (and a few strangers) have financially backed through Kickstarter – is going to come out.  And that’s that.  So I guess it’s time to stop stewing and get on with what needs doing.

I should receive the funds from Kickstarter on Monday.  That means that I can go ahead  and purchase ISBNs and once I have an ISBN, I can officially get permission to reprint the John Ashbery poem that I need permission for, and then I can get my galleys printed and send out advance copies to reviewers.

I should also write a press release to say that my kickstarter campaign was successful and that I’m gearing up to publish the week before Valentine’s day.  And I should start writing to local bookstores explaining that this is coming out, and that I’d be more than happy to come out and do a reading.  Oh, and I should write a letter to Minnesota Atheists thanking them for their support in putting my information in their weekly newsletter, and I should also write to spinning and weaving guilds to let them know that they might be interested in the controlling metaphor of the book.

When I write it out like that, it seems simple enough.  Easy, really.  No problem.  No reason to be absolutely terrified, right?

That’s what I keep telling myself.  🙂  Ok.  Brave face.  Time to be bold.

Thanks for reading – if I write any more right now, it will just be a way to procrastinate.  🙂 S

Overcoming Insecurity

I woke up this morning and my first thought was about my post yesterday.  My thought was that I didn’t really like yesterday’s post, and that perhaps I don’t want people to know what my fears are around publishing.  I am torn between acting like I know what I am doing and giving up.  I suppose, though, that there is a third option, which is to Not act as though I know what I am doing, but keep going anyway.

I think for me insecurity comes from feeling like I should know things that I don’t know.  I feel like I should know how to go about publishing my book, but how would I know that?  I haven’t done it before, so of course I don’t know how.  It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try!  I don’t think it could be too much harder than actually writing the book, could it?  Writing this book (Someotherville) was a huge project, but maybe I shouldn’t characterize it as having been hard to write.  There were some parts where I felt a little like, “how am I going to get from here to there?” but I just kept writing and it all came out fine.  It was a long project and a lot of work, but it wasn’t really difficult in the sense that doing math or playing the piano are difficult.

Maybe that’s how this new phase will be.  Maybe it will just be a series of steps that I take, none of them really all that difficult.  At least I hope that’s how this works out.  I was looking at a book on starting your own publishing business yesterday, and it said that lots of books are printed, but not every book is published.  I am still trying to decipher what the differences are, and how I can make sure that I am publishing.  I think what the author meant is that there is a lot of promotion that needs to be done.  And promotion, self-promotion, is something that I have a hard time with.   In fact, when it comes down to it the fear that I was writing about yesterday was really the fear of having to self promote.

Maybe I need to look at it like I’m not really self-promoting, I’m just promoting a book.  So what if I happened to write it?  🙂  I guess the best way for me to overcome insecurity is to jump ahead without thinking about it too much.  Actually that’s probably terrible advice, but it’s the best I’ve got.  Go ahead, give things a try, and see how it goes.  Learn from your mistakes and then try again.  I could look at all of this as a trial run for the next time I will need to publish a novel.  I do have another one started, but there’s a lot of work left to do.

Well, thanks for reading.  If you are a writer, too, and struggling with the questions of how to get published, I’d love to hear from you.

Sheila