One of my greatest fears at the moment is (finally!) doing a proper launch on my young adult urban fantasy series, Waters Dark and Deep.

This is a fiction series that I’ve been writing since 2009, that I’ve published (and later unpublished) two times now.

In so many ways, the series has been so near and dear to my heart that I don’t want to *really* launch it. Because if I do, and if it fails, it could actually hurt. Badly.

Ever feel this way?

My guess is that most people look at others around them who are Doing Things and think those people must have or know something that they don’t.

Not true, in my experience. Every time I actually do something (and trust me, there are lots of times I decide not to do something out of fear), it feels really hard and scary. I struggle with the same mindset issues as everyone else. I start at ground zero like everyone else too–as I will be doing with this new series.

I recently spoke to my accountability group about my launch plans for this series. Their first bit of feedback: write a launch plan. With you know, proper dates and actual tasks to do. I’ve launched 20+ books at this point, and yet as I was speaking to them, my intentions were flimsy and waffling!

The second thing they suggested: launch to the Prose on Fire community, even though they aren’t the main target audience. As my dear friend Kerry put it (paraphrasing), “you should use all resources available to you to make your launch as big as possible.” As my dear friend Claire put it (paraphrasing), “as long your efforts don’t focus solely on your writer community, you might as well add on to your main push.”

They were right!

It’s funny how we hold ourselves back and self-sabotage for literally no reason. I have spent years building an audience of people who read and buy what I write… and I wasn’t even going to tell them about my new books? I had all these silly stories in my head about launching Waters Dark and Deep to an audience that may have some cross-over, because I was afraid to “bug”them. Dumb!

That said, I obviously can’t just blast the books to the list, either. I need to add value and give the Prose on Fire community a reason to pay attention to this launch. That’s why I’m doing behind-the-scenes blog posts for the next month or two to share my experiments and results with launching these fiction books. Yay!

In the next post, I’ll talk about my scheduling plans to maximize exposure to these fiction books, from my non-fiction list. Read it here »

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Monica Leonelle is a USA Today bestseller and the founder of The World Needs Your Book.