On Setbacks

More setbacks.

More delays. More time to sit on my hands, which I really refuse to do. I'm constantly working on my writer's platform while I'm waiting for my editor to come back to me with my finished manuscript. That's what's so disheartening, but on the same coin, it builds me up. How do I explain this?

Well, I want the book finished, wrapped up and sent to distributors and out to the reading public. That is my foremost desire. Everything else, everything, from the web-page, to the cover designer, to the head-shot photographer and the virtual book tours are waiting for one person, my editor to finish. This is disheartening.

Although everything is in stasis, I am not. I refuse to sit still just because someone else is proving that my project is not important to them. With this being said, I move on to building up my writer's platform. A writer's platform is everything that draws readers to your book and your name. In the old days they called it a marketing campaign. Now they call it a platform. While I'm waiting on my editor I'm working on this platform. I'm choosing who to go to for my virtual book tour, I'm picking magazines to run ads in, I'm spreading my name across blogs-sites to get it out there, I'm going to review sites and preparing them to receive my book whenever it is completed to write reviews for it, I'm building an email marketing campaign and the materials that are to go into it, I'm building a Facebook marketing campaign that will have a tiny ad aimed at my target audience, I've built a Facebook page for the book, and a twitter account to let my fans know what I'm up to, and I'm working on a Google Ads campaign which is similar to the Facebook one, as well as an Amazon one.

What I'm saying is that I am working on my marketing and as soon as I get the final piece of the manuscript in hand, I'm ready to explode all over the place. The marketing is critical because they say that it is impossible to sell 10,000 copies of your book. Well, not impossible, but it's a watermark that's incredibly hard to reach. I'm hoping to push my book to reach that number and more. But 10,000 is my trigger number for the second book of the series to be launched. Once I get there, I want to automatically launch it like a rocket and follow behind the momentum of the first one with it.

Whatever happens, I am working, and the above builds me up.

I'm not going to sit around on my hands and I definitely will not stop just because I am being forced to wait on someone that I don't think cares like I do about my work. But who's supposed to care more for a project than the one that spawned the project themselves? I should be understanding that this is the way things go and recover and move. And that's my plan. To recover and move.

Setbacks only allow one to build infrastructure and nothing can stop a person who has more patience than a corpse. I am confident that my moment will come and when it does, I hope to be ready to make things happen.

I wont sit still, and I won't stop working.

I move on.

Gregory