Happy Book Birthday!

Today marks the first anniversary of the release of my first book, The Librarian’s Ruse!

To everyone who helped make the release of my first book a success, thank you!

The Librarian’s Ruse was the number one bestselling release on Amazon for days in a row, and nearly hit number one on the bestseller list in its category overall, and I couldn’t have gotten there without all of you.

Top 3 Lessons Learned

Celebrating the anniversary of the release of my first book is such a surreal experience. The journey I took to get here was long, full of challenges, obstacles, and complete chaos, but I made it! 

And not only did I make it, but I learned from it. A lot.

I could go probably go on for hours about all the lessons I learned from publishing The Librarian’s Ruse, but today I’d like to share three things I wish that I had learned/understood before publishing my first book.

So without further ado, here are the things!

#1 It’s Okay to Market Your Work

I know this seems like a super obvious statement—I mean if you create a work of art or a product and you want to sell it, then of course you need to actually let people know that it exists.

Which usually means you have to market what you have.

But self-doubt completely tanked my confidence when it came to marketing The Librarian’s Ruse.

After all, if you’ve spent more than a few minutes on the author side of Instagram, you’ve probably seen the authors who do nothing but promote and post about their books on their account—to an annoying degree, where almost every single post they make is just another advertisement for the same book.

So instead, I swung hard in the opposite direction. 

I barely posted about my book. And sure, I got a lot of sales even by doing the bare minimum of marketing (I was a #1 bestselling new release on Amazon after all), but I’m a full-time author, and I literally can’t afford to whisper about my books in a world of people who are screaming about theirs. 

Does that mean I’m only going to make posts promoting my books now? Absolutely not… But I am going to stop fear from dictating my actions.

#2 Bad Reviews Are Good 

This might sound like an oxymoron, but it’s so true! 

If you only ever get five and four star ratings, it’s a little suspicious to potential readers. Not even the most popular books in the world only have good ratings, so why would some random book on Instagram have only five and four stars ratings? 

Not to mention the fact that reviews—good and bad—help your books end up in the right hands. 

If someone gives a bad review because there’s romance in the book, or that the ending was too happy, then people who don’t like those things won’t read the book, and won’t leave more bad reviews. 

And on the other side of that, people who do like those things will read the book, and will be more likely to leave positive reviews.

So that’s why bad reviews are good for both the readers, and the author.

#3 Trust Your Launch Team/Reviewers

And on that note, this is probably the most important thing I learned from publishing The Librarian’s Ruse.

Leading up to the release of The Librarian’s Ruse, I put together a launch team. 

These amazing people helped me by posting about the cover reveal, posting their favorite lines and characters from the book, and by leaving honest reviews on Amazon and GoodReads.

But despite having asked them to leave honest reviews, I had a lot of trouble believing that they actually liked the story enough to give it four or five stars.

In fact, I doubted whether or not they were actually telling the truth even though I had no legitimate evidence to suggest otherwise.

That unnecessary doubt made me feel like a huge fraud. It stressed me out, and nearly ruined my first book launch.

I finally had to make the decision to choose to trust my launch team, and believe them when they said that they liked the story—but it wasn’t easy.

The Vulnerability of Publishing

We often refer to writing a book as extremely difficult (which for me, it totally is), but I’m convinced that publishing a book can be just as hard.

When you’ve poured hours and hours of your life into writing, editing, proofreading, and all the other steps of the process, it can be challenging to let go of your work.

Releasing my first book out into the world made me feel so vulnerable and exposed—and that’s what a lot of my fear and doubt came from. Feeling vulnerable.

But through the process, I had to learn to separate myself (at least in part) from my writing.

My identity is not found in my writing, and how good or bad people think my books are. My identity should always be found in what God says and thinks about me.

And sure, sometimes I need a reminder, but as long as I keep going back to the truth, I know that I’ll be okay.

Before You Go…

Next month I’m releasing the sequel to The Librarian’s Ruse, so I also want to take a second to say how grateful I am to everyone who has already signed up to become a part of this year’s launch team, and to those of you who were wondering if it was too late to join, it’s definitely not!

Check out this post for more details on joining the launch team for A Traitor’s Vow.