Sequels are scary...at least for me

Saturday, March 24th, I participated in a book discussion.  The book...A Hustler's Promise.

At first, I wasn't going to participate.  Why?  Because I was scared to death to hear/see what people were going to say.  I'm a little bit paranoid and a lot less confident than I appear, but aren't we all?  I mean, authors are always a little insecure about their work, right?  Please say I'm not the only one.

At the time of the book discussion, A Hustler's Promise 2 was done and ready for me to hit publish on KDP.  But as the discussion progressed, I realized that I couldn't release the second part of A Hustler's Promise as is. There were topics brought up in the discussion that made me realize that if I released this book as is, I was going to piss off a bunch of readers.

And I couldn't do that.

Saturday is when I realized the importance of not just reading Amazon and Goodreads reviews but actually LISTENING to your readers.  It was truly an eye opener.  Even though I loved how the second part turned out, I deliberately left out parts that I felt weren't important.  Turns out, I was wrong.  The same elements that I thought were not important enough to be included in the sequel were the exact same elements that my readers wanted to know.

So I put them back in.  I stayed up until 3 in the morning, rewriting a couple of chapters, adding a little bit of this and a little bit of that.  Only after I was completely satisfied that I had answered reader questions without taking away from the story, did I hit publish.

And that's when I freaked out.


I've never written a sequel before.  A million or two scary thoughts filled my head and wouldn't allow me to sleep.  What if the 2nd part wasn't as good as the first.  What if I woke up and had nothing but 1 star reviews?  What if...what if...what if...the scenarios were endless, almost to the point of tears.

By the time I finally fell asleep, I had convinced myself that my book was horrible, no one was going to read it and I was a very bad author. And there was nothing I could do about it because that little box on KDP that says "unpublish" was grayed out.  No changes could be made until I got an email from KDP saying...

"Congratulations, you have successfully published your book, A Hustler's Promise 2: Promises Kept....view it here"

So I popped 2 Ambien, washed it down with a glass of wine (yes, I know it was 4am) and went to bed.  My eyes popped open at 9am and I checked KDP.  I'd sold 70 copies in 4 hours and I waited for the negative reactions that didn't come.

I didn't actually breathe a sigh of relief until late Monday night.  Looks like A Hustler's Promise 2 is exactly what my readers wanted.

I hope I'm not speaking too soon.  (see, still a little paranoid)