Heaven's Wait Launch Day

The time had come to launch Heaven's Wait. R.J.'s Story was ready to upload. The Drippils component was ready to go. HW pages for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Smashwords were live. My blog was already up and running. A mailing list and an introductory letter to family, friends, and acquaintances were sitting in wait. The Heaven's Wait website was live in cyberspace, though online sales would be on hold until bureaucratic processes were completed. And links to all of the components were listed at every stop, including my personal website.

I uploaded R.J.'s Story to Smashwords. The site had projected a wait period of 4-7 days for the eBook to go through Smashwords' conversion and approval processes. That was fine with me. I had a few days to tweak my launch plan. Then everything would be ready to go when I got word that the book had been published on the Smashwords site.

Well . . . within ten minutes, R.J.'s Story was approved and loaded onto the Smashwords website. There was my book, with its cover image and descriptions, listed on their front page. Holy cow, now what? I hadn't expected that to happen. I had been so meticulous in following their Style Guide when preparing the manuscript that it had zoomed right through their "meatgrinder", as they call it.

I called my family so they could see R.J.'s Story while it still appeared on the front page. I knew that as new books were published, it would fall off the page. Son Mark wisely advised me to take a screen shot of the page, so I could keep it in my archives.

It was time to get to work. I emailed my introductory letter as a one-time invitation to family and friends to visit all of my links concerning Heaven's Wait. If the recipients were not interested in my project, I wouldn't bother them again with follow-up emails. I posted notices on the social networking sites, and directed visitors to sign-up forms if they were interested in being notified of HW activity in the future.

Now it was up to me to monitor and feed all of the tentacles. But it was also time for me to move on to new adventures within the realm of Heaven's Wait.