It’s scary because it’s new

I delisted To Have from everywhere but Amazon and enrolled it in Kindle Unlimited.

It’s new and scary. Despite despising staying put for too long, I don’t do well with new, which is why it’s been so difficult for me to jump out of my comfort zone and do *more* as an author. Not a single page has been read since enrolling, so I feel like I made a huge mistake. But how can it be a mistake when in the last 30 days I’ve sold one book? That’s not an exaggeration. If I’m averaging one sale a month, how can trying this new-to-me thing be wrong?

Before I made that jump, I started a reader group. Some people probably think I waited too long to do that, and by “some people” I actually mean me. It’s one of those things I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time. Not a few weeks. It’s been something under consideration for more than a year. There isn’t a guideline of when to create or do all of these things, but waiting until you’re in the throes of writing the third book isn’t the time; it should have been done before I released the first. Lesson learned, lesson given.

I’m trying to make the most of these new things, but engaging those followers is so hard when I’m not close enough to releasing a new book to offer shareable pictures and questions/engagement posts go unanswered. I haven’t written the blurb for the back of the book so the cover can be finished (sorry, Heather), so I don’t even have that to share. I can try harder.

I’m sitting on two open Google docs that I fill out and then delete. They’re for author events out of state. They’re time and money commitments, and that scares me. Two years of making less than I’ve spent scares me away from even filling out a form to be waitlisted for an event that doesn’t happen for another 11 months. I click to those tabs on my browser at least once a day and then feel the panic rise, and I can’t fill them out. Someone is going to say, “But what do you have to lose?” My sanity. Also, sleep, because I’m going to worry myself into insomnia.

I’m so thankful school starts in a couple weeks so I can focus on these new things.

Time to move forward. Can’t go back and change the past.

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