Do you struggle with perfectionism?
Right now my to do list is several miles long. 2017 was a topsy turvy year and while I learned a lot, I let a lot slide too.
So now I’m looking at updating my covers, branching my contemporary titles off under their own name, advertising, and so much more.
And that’s aside from actually writing.
Today I wanted to promote the Stormy Weather Collector’s Edition on Facebook via ads. But as I looked through my website and notes, I realized the book isn’t on Kobo, Google, iBooks or Draft to Digital.
That’s four vendors that don’t have the book on and therefore their readers can’t access and save money on this bundle.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you have this many balls, er, books in the air.
There are so many moving pieces and things are constantly changing. It’s easy to get left behind.
So as I started thinking about running the ads, I thought, I should post it to those sites.
The book is wide (meaning distributed on all platforms) and if I’m going to incur the expense of running ads, I want there to be as many opportunities for people to buy it as possible.
That makes sense right?
But here’s a bit of what my to do list looks like for this book:
update the cover art on various sites- the cover art is the 3d box set looking cover, but certain platforms (iBooks) don’t allow that style. In that case I have a standard 2d cover. However in the years (yes, that’s how long I’ve left money on the table!) since this book has been available, the size requirements have changed. Which means redoing the cover.
Redo the cover – as explained above.
Reformat the book – back matter gets stale, I have new software that makes beautiful files and for seamlessness, I’d like to use it on all my books.
Add the book to Kobo
Add the book to iBooks
Add the book to Google – wait, do I still have a google account? I’ve never bothered publishing with google since they had all that price changey funny business when they launched… years ago. (See a pattern?)
Add the book to Draft to Digital
Advertise the darned book.
So obviously, I wanted to finish the redesign of the cover before anything else. And I wanted to reformat the book too.
But here’s the thing.
I have a cover art file that’s not the size I want, and not as perfect as the new one will be, but it’s close enough. And sure, the file might not be reformatted in the new software but I do have a perfectly clean copy that was good enough for me to upload to amazon, etc. years ago. I touched up the back matter, hit save and off we went.
So now I can post the book to Kobo and Draft to Digital TODAY.
Yeah.
Today.
Perfect isn’t always the best option. Sometimes good is good enough.
Doesn’t mean those items are off my to do list and it doesn’t mean that I don’t want readers to have the very best experience possible. But I’m probably the only one who’s going to notice that there’s not a wolf on the cover or that it isn’t the “new, super size” or that the book is formatted in Word and not Vellum.
That’s on me. Sometimes, okay, usually, I’m the only one who’s gonna notice the details.
And I need to stop letting that type of thing derail me.
Because good enough really is (usually) good enough!
