After the Debut

Hurricane Baby: Stories has been out for about two months now. So I thought I’d post a few things I’ve noticed going on in my head and my life since the debut, actually after I signed the deal in the first place.

A book deal will not fix you.

If you are looking for something to ease the doubt about your abilities, fill the God-shaped hole in your soul, or validate that you have a role to play in God’s plan for the universe, a book deal is not that thing.

Signing a book contract does feel really good for a while. But it will not quiet the voices in your head that say you’re a poser, a dilettante, a pretender. Someone you know will get a better deal. You may not be able to dive into another work right away. Someone you know will sell more than you do. And all of those things will combine to make you feel like an imposter again and you won’t understand why that is.

If selling the book to a publisher is hard, selling a book to the reading public is way harder.

You can schedule a signing, and it seems like everyone you know will message you telling why they can’t make it. The books may not arrive in time. You may not get invited to all the cool kids’ books conferences, and if you do, you may sell one book at that event. You may go weeks with no sales. And all the grinding, strategizing, networking, and peppy social media posts you do may do nothing to move the needle on sales at all. Selling books is hard, and no one told us or trained us in doing any of it.

Releasing your work out in the world is terrifying.

A few weeks after I got the news about selling the book, I was seized by terror. Surely something bad was about to happen to take the joy this achievement brought into my life. The first time I read aloud from the book at a conference, my voice shook so bad I didn’t know if I could finish.

When I found out it was open for pre-orders. I was giddy for two weeks, then realized–people I know are going to read this book. People I don’t know will read it. What if I get a bad review? What if someone comes up to me someday and says how much they hated it?

Don’t let your mind think about all that. It doesn’t take you anywhere nice.

And remember, other people will not care as much as you do. Surround yourself with writing friends who get it, but large swaths of people you know and consider friends will not remember to pre-order your book, or call you on release day, or leave a review on Amazon. All those people who have been living rent-free in your head all this time that you were going to prove something to? Pfft. They don’t care.

And that’s all right.

Why?

Because to me, letting people inside my head and my heart is a payoff in a league all its own. Watching someone I don’t know come up to me asking that I sign their book, where maybe they read an article or just heard the book mentioned in passing or picked it up because it had a cool cover, is a thrill right up there with the feeling I had when I held each of my daughters when they were first born. I made this. I did it. No other feeling quite like it.