My Big Launch Day F Up

I woke up in a panic Tuesday.

The first thing I saw was a text from one of my authors.

“How come by book isn’t listed for free? I sent an email to my whole list saying it would be!”

I scratched my head. And opened my email.

“Angela, I was expecting my book to be available for free and have posted it on Facebook but it does not appear to be free. Am I doing something wrong?”

WTF!

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and sprung to action. THIS was DECIDEDLY not how the morning was supposed to start.

I was like Santa Claus all week making a list, checking it twice, and I was sure I had done everything right… but I messed up.

One of the reasons all our books become best sellers is that we do a HUGE launch party. Maybe you were there? It was pretty awesome. But one of the reasons so many people download our books is we generally launch them for free (insider secrets). The books are only free for a very short time, so if you know you are going to read the book eventually or would like to there is no reason to wait, and a really good reason to download the book now and put it on your stack for when you get to it.

Concentrating the sales on a single day boosts your visibility in Amazon and leads to many more paid sales in the long run.

But let’s get to my fuck up.

3 of the books that were supposed to be free… were not. I failed the Santa Claus test. Publishing books isn’t hard – anyone can do it – if you don’t mind dealing with approximately 1,000 details all hitting at once. The opportunities to mess up are plentiful. But 50+ books later this doesn’t normally happen to me. And at 7am Tuesday morning I was convinced not having these books free would mean we had our first launch where our authors didn’t become best sellers.

I was in a panic.

I felt like a failure.

And I was SURE these authors weren’t going to get the best seller status they worked so hard for because of my screw up.

I apologized, came up with a bit of a plan B, and accepted the grateful words from all 3 of the authors telling me not to worry and to have fun but I couldn’t shake it. So I decided (and here’s where you might think I’m nuts, but I’m okay with that) to step away from the computer and pray, meditate, connect… whatever you want to call it. I just stepped right out of the drama of my mistake and got really grateful about everything that went right, about the fact it was a rainy day and I love the sound of rain, about everything magical inside these books, and I figured if they didn’t make the best seller list, we’d find a plan B then.

But alas…. All 3 shined in the launch reaching #1 best-seller status in their categories and getting the Hot New Release designation – despite losing the advantage of the free offer.

Check these out. (and these were the ones I messed up!)

 

So here’s the moral of the story – Everything DOES NOT have to go perfectly in order for you to find success. That’s the lesson that comes back to for me. I work for perfection, but not at the expense of moving forward, despite the many, many imperfections.