Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
I couldn’t shake the thought from my head at first: I’d botched this. Badly.
That everything I’d been doing, including publishing the book in the first place, has been a huge waste of time, effort, and money. My wife had trusted me, and the book and I’d let her down, let us both down.
That—
Hang on here, man. Look at what you have done.
You have the URL aperfectblindness.com. You have the URL wlancehunt.com. You’ve started a blog with admittedly grand ideas of being a new torch bearer for the Enlightenment: you’ve been watching the war on expertise and the rise of ignorance as virtue with growing aggravation and deepening concern for a couple of decades, and damn it, with all you know and all the evidence and facts you’ve carefully curated, you’re going to fight back. You even named the blog “One Candle in the Darkness.” Then, after teaching yourself how to use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program a free, open-source graphics editor), and Canva, very slick and easy to use online graphic design software, you made that nifty logo, chose brand colors and fonts, and did all that stuff you’ve read about that will help with spreading your word on social media.
That’s something, man.
Taking heart from that, I reminded myself that I’d even begun work on one of the many themes for One Candle in the Darkness: how games can explain what you read in the news. I wrote a post that started carefully building a case about the psychological construct of agency and how that relates to action in life. This to underpin a platform from which I would launch the many ideas I had for using the insights from the book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, but in ways she never saw. Powerful, potentially transformative ways.
That post got me a first follower.
At the same time, I built out the A Perfect Blindness site with ideas and rules I tried to remember reading about before, knowing that it exists to sell my book, and so scrambling around to find elements with which to build a sales platform, swiping low resolution copies of the cover from the PDF proofs, slicing them up in Canva, trying to make them look nice in WordPress.com when I had little idea of how it functioned, then starting work on all the ideas I had for stuff I can give away on it, like playlist of songs featured in the book, and interactive maps with photos of all the clubs, and cleaning up the deleted scenes to give away, and the detailed notes to create unique voices for each of the three first person narratives behind the three point of view characters. At least I tried to make them sound different, be different using these notes. I had VOLUMES of stuff to offer, and since the book revolved around a band, I even made a band page, where I could put newspaper clippings from the book, and created some album art and thought about putting bios of the band members and—
What the hell was I doing?
This is all for people who have already read the book and want more. What am I doing to get people to read it in the first place?
See Lance—all a waste of time.
I was attacking things as if it were a massive brainstorming session, without any real plan of acting on any of it, knowing only I had to get on social media and I’ve gotta create content and have great images, and that I’d collected dozens of articles, highlighting the best bits on Instapaper and sending the highlights to Evernote so I would loose not even a single great idea and—
STOP RIGHT THERE!
Take a deep breath. Think.
Always remember: Activity does not equal achievement.
Know someone who might like this? Post it or Forward this email to let them in on it.
To ask a question or follow along with the self-publishing adventure, join the “Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness” here.