1) You start going out to eat. Like, a lot. A lot, a lot. I have at least three or four scheduled meetings/dinner/lunch plans within the next few days. It’s kind of insane, but in a really good way! Not so good for the Party Diet that I’m trying to stay on for the book release, but good in the sense that I get to eat a lot of great food!
2) You become so desperate to conserve whatever money you have left in your bank account, that you actually start carrying around your gigantic bag of collected loose change to be able to pay for things.
Exhibit A
3) As paranoid and confused as you were about taxes before, it increases by about a million percent. That brings me to another discussion point. I learned plenty of stuff in high school. I learned about the Pythagorean Theorem and a lot of physics crap that I don’t remember and something about organic chemistry and I might even be able to tell you that the integral of e to the xy looks like the word “sexy,” but boy oh boy, I did not learn one thing in high school or college about how to do your taxes. Maybe they tried to teach it and I tuned it out or something, but the point is… I am a 25 year old woman with a published novel and a Master’s Degree and I don’t know how to do taxes. This life skill completely evades me. But you know what? I don’t blame the school system. I blame the government for making it so ridiculously difficult! Seriously, I hate feeling like if I don’t understand and I make some kind of stupid mistake or error, I could end up being fined or arrested or something! I’m pretty sure that won’t happen, but it’s still something I worry about.
(I received a letter from the tax office today… can you tell?)
4) You start realizing that you’re not actually good at explaining your book out loud to people.
5) You have to set limits for yourself on how many times a day you can check your sales record. You sill actually drive yourself crazy trying to figure out if your book is actually selling or not.
6) Your new found sense of confidence inspires you to think about things that before, you’d never consider.
7) Instead of taking your day off to play around on Pinterest or stalk people on Facebook, you actually have to run around and do grown up, author things, like sending two copies of your book to the Library of Congress and writing up miniature press releases and biographies and announcements. There is basically no such thing as a day off when you’re an independent author/publisher. There is always something that you can be doing.
8) Your brain get like, ten times more cluttered than it was before. I’m just glad I managed to wear matching shoes today.
9) You realize you like the fact that you have a million things you could be doing, even though you’re scared to death that you’re either going to forget something or screw something up.
10) Everyone thinks you’re really cool for following your heart and accomplishing your goal, and you think that of yourself, too. It’s a really neat feeling. I highly recommend it.
11) You start advertising everywhere you can.
Go buy my book! 😀
A Platform of Sorts 