Launch days are hard on nerves

As you know, yesterday I officially launched The Doll That Grew. In theory, it should have been a wonderful exciting day, with me celebrating the launch of the product I have worked so hard on. The reality is much less exciting: I was stressed, irritable and didn’t eat a single meal until dinner, all because I was nervous about the book’s reception in the market.

My fears ranged from, “what if people hate the book and find it boring and badly written” to “I’m sure there is a technical problem on the book that I missed and before long someone is going to let me know how disappointed they are that I sold them such a shoddy work.” And then there was the biggest fear of all: what if no one even buys a single copy?

The good news is that all these worries and fears are normal to me. Over the years, I have come to understand that writing for me is very personal and I always feel naked when my work is out there for people to read, whether it’s an article, a poem, short story or book.

I also realise that when writing fiction, I’m creating a world, populating it with people and involving these people in a number of events, and then asking readers to suspend reality for a while and enter this world I created. And because it is a subjective thing, they may like/dislike this world I created /the people in it and I can’t control that.

Anyhoo, today is a better day. Someone whose opinion I respect bought and read the book and she liked it. And once I knew that someone not associated with the book liked it, the tension ebbed. So I can focus on the work, which includes:

• Continuing the promotion of The Doll That Grew
• Doing few small client projects
• Starting work on sub-titles for a documentary
• Doing some research on a book chapter

What’s your day like?