Awesome book launch event last Sunday afternoon for Volume 4 of the Abigail Massey stories. After some tense early moments, we ended up with a full house and a great crowd of supportive people.
My colleague, Mary, for whom this was the first real event to feature her creative work, seemed to enjoy herself very much and spoke beautifully. I did my bit and we ended up selling more than $1,000 worth of books.
All in all, an excellent day.
And now the real work begins. We have no fewer than eight promotional events on the slate for the next two months, plus media interviews, email campaigns and all kinds of other things we need to do to get people interested in the books.
It's fun but, to be honest, I find it hard. And extremely tiring. While I really enjoy the writing and I find it fun to do the public presentation part (both at speaking engagements and with the media), I do find the pace and the demands rather challenging.
You get yourself into a place where you don't want to miss any opportunity to promote the book so you have a very hard time saying no. You check your email constantly, you're always on Facebook or Twitter or Youtube tracking the progress of your various campaigns and you always... ALWAYS... feel like you have to respond fully and immediately to any request.
No matter how run down I get during these periods, I keep reminding myself that I should be grateful that anyone is taking an interest in the books. That I should be (and I really am, to be honest) delighted when the media calls wanting to cover the story and promote the book. That I should be honoured (and I ALWAYS am) that someone wants to spend his or her hard-earned money on the book that I wrote, over all the competing priorities in their lives.
Speaking of the media, I enjoyed a really fun interview this morning with a reporter for one of the bigger New Brunswick newspapers and I am very grateful that the Abigail books will be featured in a publication of that size and reach. The reporter was very nice and very well prepared, with great questions. Even better, she actually listened to what I had to say and asked excellent follow-up questions.
One thing that threw me, however, was that she didn't have a pen nor a single piece of paper with her. She read her prepared questions from her smart phone. She recorded our conversation on her smart phone. And when I gave her contact names and information for further research, she typed that directly into her smart phone.
Wow. It's a brave new world.
