Today’s your book launch.

You’re sipping sweet champagne for breakfast, along with the freshest croissants, leafing through a Tesla catalogue, looking at that Model X that’ll get from 0 to 60 in a stupidly short time but also like save the planet. Then you remember that you’ve got a reservation at the Ivy tonight. But the doorbell goes. Who could it be? Oh! It’s your new yacht! Twenty foot longer than the old one. And it’s gold-plated. And filled with fresh fifty-pound notes.

Right?

Or are you sitting at your desk, feverishly going through the copy edits for a book you’ve slipped the deadline on twice now, hitting the refresh button on the Amazon product page every five seconds to see if the ranking has changed or if anyone’s reviewed it or—

The ranking has changed! It’s gone down. Oh.

People think when you get that book deal, that’s you hobnobbing with the stars, pricing up yachts or villas in Greece, but what’s the reality like?

By the time that bloody book comes out, it’s a weight off your shoulders. You’ve spent months writing it, probably took a few years off your life in the process. Your agent tore it apart, so you rewrote it until they liked it. They sent it out, it got rejected but you were lucky enough that someone bought it. And they edited it, four different stages which seemed to go on forever and took more years off. They commissioned a cover and you acted like you know what you’re talking about when you critique it. They do some nice blurb text, which you comment on like you even care by this point. Then you wait, checking Amazon for the sales rank on preorder. Checking Goodreads. Checking your google alerts are working. Wait, is that a new review? No, it’s that old one, the one on Goodreads that someone posted for the wrong book.

Then you meet your publicist and they’ve got loads of really funky ideas to get you in the papers and on the telly. Then you get the advance copies through the post and you’re a professional author! Actual books! And CDs and DVDs with the audiobook! You start to feel something in the pit of your stomach — is it excitement? Or just sheer terror?

The blog tour kicks off. The Amazon chart placing doesn’t budge. Your agent and editor stop answering your emails about how many preorders it’s done.

ARGH.

At this point, the book is like Shrödinger’s Cat, it’s both the biggest hit ever and the biggest disaster ever, at least until someone looks inside the box.

And it’s book launch day. Supposed to be the best day ever. But you stupidly checked your Amazon page just before you went to bed, didn’t you? Kept you thinking about stuff you can’t control when you’re supposed to be asleep. You even managed to get off to sleep after an hour spent working out where you’d like to meet JK Rowling, Stephen King and Lee Child for brunch. But then you woke up from a fever dream about accidentally mistweeting something, where you pissed everyone off and you have to go back to your old joke. So you get up for a glass of water, but you’re really checking your phone. The Amazon page has nudged up a little bit. Yay! But JK Rowling, Stephen King and Lee Child still haven’t got back to you. And you didn’t really mistweet something. Phew. So you go back to sleep, eventually get some, blissfully without a dream, then you give up tossing and turning at about six. And you get up. Again, like a lab rat, you check your phone for that dopamine hit.

Everyone at your publisher has wished the book well.

Your agent sent an encouraging message, their agency tweeted it.

The blog tour is going well.

And you can see the preorders. It’s going okay.

But what the hell do you do with book launch day?

Copy editing. Ignore everything.

Once you’ve sent an email to your mailing list. Once you’ve reminded your early readers to review it. Once you’ve tweeted about it. Once you’ve posted on your Facebook page.

You put the Beatles on to cheer you up. You don’t even like them.

But the lid of the box is open. You can peer inside, if you want. You can find out if it’s dead, or if it’s alive. But do you? Is it a monster hit? Is it a disaster?

So you check. The Amazon product page hasn’t changed since the middle of the night. It’s a disaster! But you keep refreshing the Amazon product page. You keep emailing your agent and editor to see how they think it’s doing and do they want any more books and is your career over, is it all a disaster, do you have to go back to your old job?

At some point during that day, you see it’s doing something. It’s defined itself. It’s a thing now, its success a tangible fact. The sales are recorded on some ledger somewhere, someone’s report or spreadsheet starts processing it. You lost any control of how good it was after you finished editing. It’s someone else’s baby now. And it belongs to the readers now, not you. You just wrote it, but it’s become something else.

And the reality is that all that weird stuff was inside your head. You’re getting too paranoid, too frazzled. Spending that time copy editing was smart, it distracted you for that hour. The book idea you sent to your agent, who enjoyed it enough to make you feel like it could work, that’s what you cling to. The next thing. Something shiny and new. Something you can control until they take it from your burnt fingertips and put you through that again.

Or is it you putting yourself through it?

The reality is somewhere in the middle. You should sit back and enjoy it for what it is. Some small part of the world will be yours for a couple of days, maybe a week, maybe a few months. You’ve achieved something very few people do — you wrote a book, you edited it, you made it as good as you could at that point in time. It’s out there, someone else’s baby. You’ve got peers now, you’re welcome at the table. You’ll have friends who are writers too, ones more successful than you, but ones less successful. The important thing is to enjoy it, savour the moment when your book is released and you pass it on for everyone else to enjoy.

But make sure you refresh the product page every minute.

I love this post, thank you Ed. I admire your honesty and if truth to be told, I did giggle a little at times whilst reading it.

I have the first DI Fenchurch book on my wishlist so hope to make a start on what promises to be a cracking series soon.

In For The Kill by Ed James was published in the UK by Thomas & Mercer on 19th April 2018 and is available in paperback, eBook and audio formats (please note, the following links are affiliate links): | amazon.co.uk | amazon.com | Waterstones | Book Depository | Goodreads |

Ed lives in the East Lothian countryside, 25 miles east of Edinburgh, with his girlfriend, six rescue moggies, two retired greyhounds, a flock of ex-battery chickens and rescue ducks across two breeds and two genders (though the boys don’t lay eggs). While working in IT for a living, Ed wrote mainly on public transport but now writes full time.

Author Links: | Facebook | Website | Twitter | Instagram |

Author Image and Biog © https://edjamesauthor.com/