Focus in 2020
This week has seen a reality check in terms of the financial cost of indie publishing and led to a massive loss in confidence that had me sitting in a café, crying into my coffee and writing in my notebook that it was all over. At that moment I was prepared to draw a line in the sand, acknowledge that we have had a fabulous adventure with You can do it Joey! but … no more.
What led to this week? The Joey experience has been a relatively smooth one. It started as a small project that grew and Meaghan and I grew along with it and we are immensely proud of the book we produced. We know that hundreds of children around the world love this book and it is being borrowed from libraries around Australia.
I then had an idea about a series of three small chapter books. The books were written and I received great feedback. Two publishers saw the books and liked them but didn’t take them on.
It was time to embark on the indie publishing adventure again. Meaghan and I would produce the three books and send them out into the world. She has been illustrating book one and I underestimated how much work was involved in the illustration, design and layout of the books. And they need to be printed.
- Enter reality check – I cannot afford at this time to produce the three books.
- Enter loss of confidence – why didn’t I realise this? Because I so badly wanted these three books in the hands of readers who would hopefully love them as much as I did. With the emotion I felt around these books I took my eye off the business of being an indie publisher.
During long tearful conversations with Meaghan and my husband Peter we started making decisions and plans.
We would continue with book one and get some advice on how to implement the ideas I have for marketing the book. Like most authors I am not a natural when it comes to marketing myself and my books but this book has to succeed for us to proceed with the others.
As with any enterprise there are good days and not so good days. I guess it’s how we deal with the not so good days that lead us to success. I know that these books will go out into the world. Just not as quickly as I’d hoped.
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