Grey Stone

Soooo... My book came out and now I'm famous and rich and it was easy and you can do it too in 3 easy steps. hahahahaha.

But my book did come out. And it has been fun and exciting, but also so much more stressful than I had imagined it would be. (Boring, wandering, sometimes whiney post to ensue; read at your own risk.)

There's always a little stress in creating a book, but the real stress started in June when I was supposed to get a look at the completed cover and then the book was supposed to be done and get published. Except that the cover we got was (literally) exactly what I had told the cover artist I did NOT want and I was so disappointed, and kind of angry too. The publisher felt kind of bad about this (as she should have) especially since the cover was already LATE. So she hurried to hook me up with an artist from Fiverr. I knew nothing about Fiverr, except that it was supposed to be fast, so I was relieved. But Fiverr is also really cheap and the artist clearly did not speak English as her first language. And the cover she created was a painful process of me (literally) looking stock images up on the Internet and saying, "Could you do something like this..." and her plopping that image into the picture in a way that was not what I meant or had in mind. It was painful and when people saw it, they were like, "That cover sucks." So Jake and I decided to bite the bullet and hire a real cover designer with our own money. Here the story got a lot better and I actually felt pretty blessed. At a book fair a few weeks earlier, I'd seen a cover by a self-published author that I just loved and found out who had created it. I contacted them even though they had a very long wait time in the hope that they could still squeeze us in (keep in mind that by now the book was already delayed and we didn't want it to be months). They agreed to do our cover as long as it was symbol or weapon art. Fine by us. And, long story short, they did a bang up job. And I love the cover and everyone else loves the cover. And it was all okay. In fact, I'm kind of glad that Ink Smith's cover was so awful because if it had been fine I think we would have just taken it and missed the chance to have a really amazing cover instead. So I'm glad for the glitch and the delay and I feel blessed to have stumbled across a cover designer who did amazing work quickly for us.

So then we had a cover, but there were other glitches too and everything just seemed to take so much longer than I thought it would all take. Like, there was a map for the book and they put it in and it looked super light and just kind of crappy and that had to get fixed. And I had to do it. In fact, there were lots of things that I had to do that I felt like they should be doing, and there were a lot of details that I thought they should have noticed, but they either didn't or didn't care, so I had to notice them and take care of them. At times, it made me really angry. I felt like I was doing a lot of the work of a self-published writer without the income boost that a self-published writer enjoys (because the publisher takes a big cut) For example, I copy-edited the dang thing, like, 45 million times and I know there are still probably glitches, but it was all I could do. And there were these events that I was trying to plan that had to keep getting cancelled or postponed. And there were a million questions and requests for the publisher that I felt like they weren't interested in answering or resolving, which was so frustrating because it wasn't always in my power to resolve them since I wasn't a self-published author. I don't think they know or care too much about the marketing or PR side of the book. And that was hard. I'd done a bunch of research and had learned several things myself and even getting them to do those things was pretty frustrating (and not always successful). I spent a lot of my own time soliciting people to read the book and do reviews for Amazon and Goodreads, and researching other reviewers and book fairs and a bunch of other stuff. It was a lot of little detail stuff and it all took forever and lots of it made me cry. Bleh.

BUT eventually the book got published and when I got it, I thought it looked pretty great and the size and feel of the book was nice and the pages were high quality (I'd been honestly so stressed and unhappy with the publisher at this point that I was worried it would come out with wacky colors or those thin cheap pages that mass market paperbacks have, or something awful. But then I thought it looked professional and beautiful, so the publisher was forgiven for several things because at least they could turn out a decent looking book). Kip had the kids make me little "Congratulations on your book" letters and they were so sweet and cute. But Savannah's said something like, "Now you can stop being stressed so much." And that made me feel guilty. Because I have been stressed and more grumpy than I should be about things that aren't always in my power to fix or control and I'm sorry the kids are feeling that somewhat.

But my family and friends have really risen up in a show of support that has literally moved me to good tears, which is a nice change of pace. People all over offered to read and review the book. People all over have bought the book and keep telling me they're reading and reviewing it. My family has been so above and beyond supportive. Seeing that alone has made it worthwhile.

It's been a challenging thing and a thing that has stretched me and made me feel insecure and inadequate on several levels. I still get a little sad/crazy when someone's like, "I liked your book, but I didn't understand X." And then I start thinking, "Maybe it's awful; maybe it doesn't make any sense." But it's good for me to just learn to let that stuff go too. Good for me, but hard for me.

Thank you all for your support and love. I hope you love the book.