Tonight I’m off to the Brisbane launch of The Silver Well, a short story collection by Kim Wilkins and Kate Forsyth. There will be wine, readings, finger food, book signings, and an evening spent celebrating two awesome writers who have done something new. Some time tomorrow, depending on the timezone the various sales sites are using, my short story collection The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales will be available for sale.  The launch will consist of a blog post, a handful of tweets spaced out over the last few weeks, and me going back to work on my next project for Brain Jar Press. Today I’m going to talk about why. WHAT NEW WRITERS THINK BOOK LAUNCHES ARE ALL ABOUT New writers look forward to their book launch, but they don’t always understand how they fit into the publishing ecosystem. In the five years I spent answering phones at Queensland Writers Centre, the calls where people asked “how can I get people/the media to come to my book launch and sell books?” were among the most frustrating and difficult to answer because the disconnect between what people expected from their launch and what launches actually do were incredibly wide.

I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use of the anxiety-driven energy that set in. One of those projects involved sitting down and implementing the Pyramid Technique for figuring out where my writing-and-publishing priorities are currently sitting. This technique is borrowed from Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway, where he uses it to help clarify life priorities. This feels like a good time to do this, as I’m heading into the second half of the year with the distinct feeling that I’ve got a lot of planes in the air and nothing is really landing. PHASE ONE: THE INITIAL PYRAMID The process I’m using ran something like this: Grab a bunch of index cards Every writing and publishing project that has my attention gets a card, regardless of what stage it’s at, or where the results will be published. All that matters is that it’s on my mind mind, and getting a fraction of

I logged to Amazon this morning to see how pre-orders were going for A White Cross On A Lonely Road. The nice thing about the dashboard they offer is the way it lines up a whole lot of books you’ve published in a row. If you’ve made a decision to adopt a standardised layout, that means you get a neat little visual when you log in. I’m still working through some of the older releases, bringing them into line with the standardised approach, and I’ll admit that I’ve gone back-and-forth between this and trying for a more genre appropriate cover for certain kinds of work. Today, though, was the first time I looked at them as a whole and felt satisfied with the effect. The approach is very much an approach that is designed to work with my relatively limited graphic design skills and keep the production side of things fast, but theres just enough scope to try new things and tweak the design as I go and while they may not always scream “fantasy story’ or “horror story” or “science fiction,” I’m pretty pleased with the way it makes it clear that you’re looking at something Brain Jar has