What I’ve Learned Since The Outcast’s Release + Double Audiobook Giveaway!

What I’ve Learned Since The Outcast’s Release + Double Audiobook Giveaway!

I once heard that launching a novel does not change your life, but it has. Almost one year ago—July 1, 2013—my debut, The Outcast, was born, and in many ways I feel like I was reborn right along with it.

Honestly, I did not enjoy that launch season very much. The same as with the birth of my firstborn daughter, I pushed myself too hard and my expectations were too high.

I expected my daughter to sleep through the night by twelve weeks old, and I expected The Outcast to be on the NYT bestseller list by twelve weeks old.

Let me tell you, neither happened.

I spent energy I didn’t have to spare, trying to wrench open doors that were not willing to budge.

I bemoaned trivial details and didn’t celebrate the small victories.

I set the joy of writing aside to pursue marketing when—carefully modulated—I could’ve done both.

The Outcast has no doubt been successful, but I believe that most of this success could’ve happened with me just sitting on my front porch, enjoying the journey rather than pushing on doors.

So, guess what? The Midwife, my sophomore novel, is twenty-nine days old, and I’m sitting on the front porch, enjoying the journey.

My husband commented this week that this launch season has been so calm. He almost seemed afraid to admit this—as if to jinx everything and stir up a publicity-crazed tempest of a wife—but I just smiled and nodded, breathing a sigh of relief that he was right.

Part of this is because I’m thirty weeks pregnant with our second little girl, so there’s only so much waddling around and wrenching of doors I can do to make things physically happen.

Another part is because the past year has built my trust in my publisher, and I know they are working at wrenching open doors that I don’t have the power to open on my own.

Another reason is because—though I never want to become apathetic about promoting my work—I believe that the art of writing must always come first.

I am not a publicist or a social media guru. I enjoy these aspects of my career and know they are important.

But they are not as important as the words and the worlds that they create.

One of the people I most respect in my publishing house asked me last summer how my debut author experience was going. I admitted I was having trouble juggling it all, so she told me to simply stop. To say no. To instead focus on the stories because she would rather have my stories than my efforts to promote them.

I am a slow learner, so it’s taken an entire year for her words to sink in.

And yet, now I’m heeding them.

I am doing all of the publicity work I love: connecting with readers through book signings and social media, doing radio and newspaper interviews, and writing guest posts, but I am also working on a story and therefore I am doing what I know I was made to do—typing away on the front porch as hummingbirds zip around my head and the crows squabble over the rain-watered garden.

This is art; this is beauty. This is the process that should always come first.

Writers, did it also take you a while to realize that writing must come before publicity? How do you juggle both?

In honor of the end of audiobook month, Oasis Audio is generously offering a double-pack giveaway of both The Midwife and The Outcast. Just share what you’re reading right now to enter!