Now there’s a vision. 3 – 2 – 1 – Launch the Octopus! Fwoosh! Slooo-ooop, plop!
I can’t imagine they’d be the most aerodynamic of beasts. Still, with this vision in mind, the day is almost here where Tedrick rides the waves once more.
Launch day used to be a nerve busting time, a time where I’d be chewing my nails down to their stumps, where I’d be dreaming about spell checking issues and front cover problems and waking up in the middle of the night because I used the passive tense. No jokes. This business really gets inside your head.
Now I’m a little more relaxed with the whole affair, and that’s mostly because I’ve gotten some of the processes in place to ease things through. Setting time aside for drafts for example, means the book isn’t rushed. Starting the front cover design early on means I can iterate through a few sketches first, try out a couple and decide. Then there’s the uploading to the various distributors with their different formats and requirements.
It’s all very taxing, but at least there’s a way to ease through it all.
Lastly, the concept of the ‘pre-order’ has been a boon. The actual intent of the pre-order is to give time and a platform to shout out the book, build some interest, get some search-engine stuff going – that’s great, and I’m working to be better at that, but what I really love about it is that it gives me a deadline. Not a soft ‘yeah, I’ll have this by next month’ deadline but a real ‘you’d better get the damn thing right by August 13th’ deadline.
And that keeps the focus.