Feeling nervous now

Strangely, I’m feeling nervous about releasing my second book, KILLING GODS (which is out tomorrow, woo! yikes!)

I think it’s because this time round, I have something to prove. With POWERLESS I had no idea what I was doing or how to go about it. Yes, I’d read as many articles on self-publishing as I could. Yes, I’d researched about how and where to advertise to get the word out. Yes, I’d spent a year writing and re-writing the book in the hope of crafting something that would make a decent read and wouldn’t be an embarrassment of a first novel for me to look back on in ten years time. But even having done all this, I was still flinging it out into a yawning chasm and waiting for an echo.

Which was great in a way, because I didn’t have anything to prove or to lose. Failure wasn’t just an option, it was the default setting. Any sales at all would give me hope that I had got at least one of the self-pub/advertising/writing triumvirate right.

However for KILLING GODS, I now have something to directly compare it against.

Have I learned the lessons from my first self-publishing effort and expanded my reach enough/to the right places? Have I planned to advertise enough and in the right places also? Is the book itself as good as or better than the first book?

Ultimately it comes down to “Will it sell better than the first book?”. With POWERLESS, I had no point of comparison (apart from a few dozen free downloads of my short story collection). This time round, I have exact sales figures from multiple sources. If the book doesn’t do as well, then with which element(s) have I failed? If the book does better, which element(s) have I improved upon?

So yeah, happy the book is coming out, and interested to see the reviews and reaction (and watch the sale figures) but still nervous.