Let me tell you about the moment my book went live on Amazon.
I had spent eighteen years answering the phone for people with complaints about their neighbors. I had managed twenty-six communities. I had attended over four hundred HOA meetings. I had once processed a trespassing warrant on a man who was sleeping under a building foyer and felt complicated about it. I had, by any reasonable measure, seen things.
None of that prepared me for hitting publish.
I hit the button. I waited. I refreshed the page. I hit the button again because nothing seemed to be happening. I refreshed the page again. I called my partner in from the other room and said something is happening and also possibly nothing is happening and I am not sure which. The dog — the real Kayla, who you will meet if you haven't already — looked at me with the expression she reserves for moments when I am being particularly human.
The book went live. Four people bought it before I had told anyone it existed.
Four people. Strangers. People who found it through whatever mysterious algorithm governs the great river of Amazon and thought — yes, I would like to read about neighbor complaints. Those four people will never know what they did for me. They will probably never know the book exists. But somewhere out there, four people are reading my first book, and I think about that more than I should.
I now refresh my KDP dashboard approximately forty-seven times a day. This is not an exaggeration. I check it when I wake up. I check it after lunch. I check it before bed. I check it in the parking lot of the grocery store while my partner waits in the car and pretends not to notice.
The dashboard shows me royalties, orders, pages read. It is updated daily. I check it hourly. This is not rational behavior. I am aware.
Here is what I have learned in the first weeks of being a published author: the book part is the easy part. The after is a whole separate education. There are ads to set up and campaigns to monitor and Facebook pages to manage and LinkedIn posts to write and a website to build and a blog — oh hello, you found the blog — and all of it is happening simultaneously while I also work full time and feed the cats and remind the real Kayla that she does not, in fact, need to bark at the mailman every single day.
But also — I wrote a book. It is on Amazon. People are buying it. Four strangers bought it before I told anyone.
I think that is worth refreshing a dashboard for.
See you next week.
— Kayla
P.S. If you have read the book, please leave a review. I will refresh that dashboard too.