Ouch. I just got a painful review for one of my books.
Here’s what I’m going to do about it.
Keep going.
There you have it. I could stop this post right here and you’d know what to do.
But I need to work through this as it did bum me out and I need to set this free.
I write a lot. I write a lot of books, too. Even the review mentioned it. She said something along the lines of “I read Every Single Day and then I read this short book and the quality has declined.”
And yep, she’d be right.
Every Single Day is my, well, autobiography.
It’s a big piece of work, my masterpiece (at least, so far). It’s going to be hard to top that. In fact, I’m not even trying to. That book took me 20 years to write.
I can’t match that depth in a book I write in a year–or 3 months.
So what am I going to do about it?
- Learn,
- improve,
- keep going.
Expectations
I *know* that Every Single Day is my best book (so far…although Create is going to give it a run for its money). I’m not sure I’m even trying to top ESD.
I want to expand on it, enhance it, sprinkle more around it. If ESD is the cake, then the other books are cupcakes.
But here’s the real thing on my mind:
I truly am a numbers guy. Quantity does matter and, eventually, leads to quality. Mathematically speaking, I need to have some books be “better” than others. They can’t all be number one. You can’t have two favorite foods (mine is Indian food). There won’t be a tie for the NCAA basketball championships. Someone has to lose. Someone has to win.
It’s OK.
Here’s another upside to the review: I’m going to pay attention to it, keep it in mind, and improve the work from here on out. But I’m also going to set expectations.
Not lower them necessarily, but set them. Not so much, “This book won’t be as good as Every Single Day, but this book is good, too.”
More along the lines of, “This is a short book covering a single, simple topic.” I don’t know, I just made that up. But that’s what the books in the Repossible series are: shorter, simpler, single-topic books.
Remember, Repossible could absolutely be a single, big, really long and complicated book. Yep, sure could have been. But I don’t even like reading those big books myself so I couldn’t bring myself to write one. It just wouldn’t be fun.
So there will be some hard knocks, some jabs that get in and catch me on the chin.
But I’ll shake them off and come back stronger, keep at it, stay in shape, keep writing, keep creating, and keep improving.
