Beautiful Feedback!

Since I put my book up for a free promotion, almost 400 people downloaded it. Exciting! It was very interesting to see the numbers change for those 5 days and now I wait for people to write reviews. That is the most important thing for a writer. It is the ugly baby syndrome. You can think that what you created it the most beautiful baby in the world, but if it is truly ugly, then it is.

Now don't get me wrong. I am definitely victim to this syndrome also. I see my book as something that I wrote and do not see the flaws as easily. However, something amazing happened yesterday. I received a call from a friend of mine (you know who you are). His mother had read my book and had some very constructive criticism about it. At first it was hard to hear, but I swallowed my pride and took it for what it was. Honest feedback.

The main comment was the first half of the book. I tried something different, which was writing from two perspectives and pull them together into the story. What resulted was a lot of repeating and can be very annoying to the reader. Ok, this was a fail. It happens. Now I can learn from it and move on. As was stated about the second half of the book, it was much easier to read. The story was compelling and flowed nicely (not my words). There was one other comment toward the end that I need to look at expanding on, which is helpful too.

As a writer, it is hard to get feedback sometimes. Your pride feels a little wounded at first, but once you get past your own ego and accept it, you realize that you have an opportunity. Someone has just given you insight on success. They told you specifically what it is you can change to make a better book. How can I let my ego get in the way of that?

To all of those that have downloaded the book, THANK YOU. As a dedicated writer, I believe in listening to my readers. I will be revisiting the book in the next month or two and release an update. Please be patient with me as I do this and any additional feedback is more than welcome. These are exciting times and I look forward to growing as a writer!