It’s here! Hard-backed and all.
Well, today’s the pub day for The Coaching Habit 10th anniversary edition. Woo hoo!
I’m a lot less anxious and tangled up about this one, thank goodness.
I think this is probably the tenth “pub day” I’ve experienced since I wrote my first book back in, hmm … 2008, I believe.
There’s one piece of advice I give authors as they think about their own book launches. And it took me a while to figure it out.
Get Unstuck & Get Going on the Stuff That Matters was that 2008 book, and there was a fair bit of drama that came with it.
I was self-publishing it, and this was well before self-publishing was relatively straightforward. And in this case, it was a very complicated book. Hardback, with a CD in the inside cover, and most of it cut into three vertical sections, so you could create different question combinations.
There were production and shipping delays. I’m a terrible project manager at the best of times, and it was all going wrong.
Relief came when Marcella told me that I could just change the publication date.
I’d created an artificial finish line. If that wasn’t working for me, change the line.
Then there was Find Your Great Work, a little book I self-published about doing more work that has both meaning and impact.
Three days after I confirmed a 5,000 edition print run, I got an offer from a fancy NY publishing house to do a version with them.
It turned out I had just six months to sell as many of those books as I could, before we took them off the market to clear the way for the revised version, Do More Great Work.
Ten years ago The Coaching Habit came out, self-published again, having been turned down repeatedly by that same NY publisher.
On pub date, Marcella took me out for breakfast at a cool Toronto diner, an experience I mostly didn’t enjoy because I was fretting about whether anyone was going to buy this book, and was refreshing the Amazon page obsessively. (Spoiler: people did buy copies.)
So what’s my one piece of advice?
It’s no small thing to get a book out into the world. (And you can substitute “book” for any milestone in any project you’re working on.)
Celebrate the moment. Really pause and soak it in.
Don’t worry about the hustle of getting it sold. There’s plenty of time for that.
Don’t fret about what hasn’t worked in your marketing so far. There are loads of those for every author.
By getting a book out into the world, you’ve already won.
Find people you love, get them together in some way, and really enjoy this moment. Allow yourself to feel the pleasure and weight of this achievement. It really is something.
Here’s how I’m celebrating … I’m getting together with a small group of lovely people tonight for a glass of wine and some nibbles at my favourite wine bar. No big deal. But also, a big deal.
Be a person who celebrates the moments. For your sake, and for ours.
