THOUGHTS ON “LAUNCHING”
I opened my email this morning to a notification from UPS: “Hi, Amanda! Your package is arriving today.” I couldn’t remember ordering anything, so I used my truly sophisticated forensic skills and clicked on the baguette-like mustard-yellow button, “Track Your Package.” All that did was give me a window for delivery from something called LSI in Lexington, KY. I know no one from Kentucky. Who is LSI?
Only when I saw the weight, 17.90 lbs, did it occur to me what this mystery package was.
By now, I’m sure you know what I’m getting at. But this was the oddest way of learning that between 2 and 5 pm today, I should receive a box full of copies of MY FIRST BOOK: It Will Have Been So Beautiful. By Amanda Shaw. By…me.
Two screenshots and “The book is arriving today!” elicited a text from my husband “Be sure you have video of opening it!” To which I replied, “Umm, should the fridge repair guy hold the phone? How much do we tip for that?”
Apparently, my dear spouse had an important meeting just then that precluded responding to snark.
There are many milestones for writers, no matter their level of “success.” It is absolutely life-changing in every possible way to have a book in the world. There’s so much to look forward to, most of it good, and the whole experience will include both joy and terror.* Good terror, of course, but still terror.
I’ve always guarded my privacy, almost jealously. Hard as it is to get a book of poetry into the world, launching a website has been the most stressful aspect of this process. Having to “get myself out there” to promote the book is a million miles outside of my comfort zone. And the nitty-gritty of online marketing is a world away from the bliss of holding this gorgeously designed edition from Lily Poetry Review Books in my hands.
Until now, my engagement with the internet has been limited to finding both useful and utterly useless information, and (sometimes narrowly) avoiding apocalyptic battles. Now I have to “post” into the wild blue yonder. The tangled Web, the Cloud in our virtual sky.
It will be a learning curve to make this my own. But mostly what I’d like to say, in this opening post, is Hello book lovers, writing tribe, and all kindhearted and frustrated inhabitants of this still gorgeous blue-green earth. I’m happy to be sharing it with you.
AUTHOR’S NOTES:
*in the form of: people texting as you read your most heartfelt work in “poet-voice,” pro-forma replies from bookstores uninterested in indie presses, and all the other little reminders that poetry needs champions in this world. But also: meeting fellow lovers of words and art, reconnecting with what is good in the world, and discovering that, gosh, people actually like me.