My book has been out a couple of days, and while I haven’t been promoting it at all, friends and family know that it’s out and several have purchased it. It feels wonderful to have people read something I wrote and gain access to my thoughts (I don’t communicate all that well in person). But at the same time, only one person has given me any feedback whatsoever on the book, which is making me crazy.
The thing that keeps me halfway sane is knowing there are multiple explanations for why people are silent about the book.
- People are very busy. There’s a high probability they haven’t gotten a chance to read it yet.
- The people I know are polite and don’t exactly care for the book, but they would never tell me that straight up, so they are just saying nothing about it.
- They are still processing the book and deciding how they feel about it.
- They’ve read the book, but offering me a well-thought critique is not exactly on top of their priority list (see #1 above).
- They’ve read the book and love it, but feel strange expressing things like that to me (I know I often feel that way about expressing feelings, and I often think “Oh, they know how I feel already” or “How I feel is not important to them”).
So, the answer is I should not stress about people’s silence on a story I’ve written and shared with them. The outside world will read it soon enough, and they won’t be shy about sharing their view of it, good or bad.
Bike Newbie 