The Hard Sell Is Out

Finally, after many false starts, The Hard Sell is available on Amazon. I probably should have mentioned this when I published it a month ago. Yes. That would have been ideal. Still, here we are.

It feels like a victory just getting this book finished. For a long time, I thought it wasn’t going to happen. After I published my first book, I immediately started on my second and planned to have it out within a few months. A year at most. Well. An embarrassing number of years later (okay, it’s five), here it is.

I didn’t mean to take so long but it happened. Partly because I had another baby in that time and hyperemesis is the enemy of productivity. It’s surprisingly difficult to Get Stuff Done when you’re busy trying not to throw up all day. There are probably better women than me out there, who outline a 10 volume magnus opus while they’re lying miserable on the bathroom floor. They probably keep to a strict 10,000 word daily schedule because these books aren’t going to write themselves, guys! I’m not one of those women. Good luck to them. I mostly spent my time complaining. Then I had a baby, taking my child collection to three, and that was delightful but, again, not all that helpful when it came to having time to sit in front of my computer banging on the keyboard.

The other problem I didn’t figure out for a long time. I’d started the story in the wrong place. Once I’d moved it to a year later and let my main characters deal with the aftermath of their choices the year before, things got better. It was painful deleting all those words but, on the bright side, they were terrible.

Then there was family life stuff and a lot of procrastination as always, but I kept plodding along because what else is there to do? Getting to a final draft felt like I’d finished a hundred marathons, one after the other. After that, the rewrite was a breeze.

I’m very happy it’s out. I hope people will like my spiky, work-obsessed, convinced-she’s-unlovable, Anne as much as I do. I think she’s amazing.