So at first, it’s all sort of exciting and encouraging. You’re compiling all these things you wrote years ago and revisiting them and everything that’s good about them just sort of jumps out at you. You’d forgotten that joke, but reading it again it’s still funny. You’re surprised by a turn or a tangent or an insight somewhere.
This is good stuff, you think. I’m proud of this. This is going to be good.
But then you’ve got to do some more careful copyediting and proofreading. You’ve got to format the thing and then double-check the formatting. And now you’re reading it all over and over and over again and what jumps out at you is all the quirks, the tics, the repetition, the clunkers and not-quite-successful punchlines.
And long before you’re finished with all of that, you’re tired of this stuff. You can barely manage to force yourself to skim it all one last time. But you do, you force yourself to do it until finally you’re at last done with it, even though at that point you’ve made so many corrections that you’re certain you’d never really be done — certain that it’s still riddled with typos and errors and all sorts of embarrassing mistakes you were unable to catch because you just can’t stand to look at it even one more time.
Then you click publish.
And now, at this point, when you can’t even stand the sight of the thing anymore — this is when you’re supposed to pivot into marketing mode. Now you’ve got to turn around and tell everybody how great it is.
This is why I’m glad that the Kindle publishing feature has this 12-hour delay built-in. I can still, vaguely, remember just a short while ago thinking “This is good stuff .. this is going to be good.” But right now? Ugh.
Give me 12 hours, though, and the realization that this is no longer a chore will sink in. I’ll be able to go back to looking at it and thinking of it in terms other than as that endless, oppressive chore of proofing and editing and formatting. And those jokes will start to seem funny to me again.
That still won’t fix the fact that I’m not very good at this whole marketing and promotion deal. But give me 12 hours and I should, at least, be back to wanting to do it.
All of which is to say that The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 2 should be available for purchase tomorrow on Amazon.
If you’re looking for something to read in the meantime, allow me to recommend The Anti-Christ Handbook Vol. 1, or perhaps Long March of the Koalas.
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