Hey, congrats on all those books! That's quite impressive.
So, you have a challenge on your hands: how do you turn it into an
opportunity, an excuse to do new and interesting things which will contribute to happiness and personal development (rather than worry)?
As long as it's enjoyable rather than terrifically stressful, you might try to spend some fixed amount of time each week doing grass-roots promotion of the book. I'm sure you've thought of at least some of these, but here's a list off the top of my head:
1. Email the head librarian or the person in charge of acquisitions at your favorite public libraries, locally or anywhere you might be visiting, include a pdf excerpt and offer to lead a discussion group at a convenient time for anyone interested.
2. Same for bookstores. In fact, any sort of community center would work: you could even make this into a kind of public service event, visiting various women's centers, or hospital wards where the patients are all extremely bored (but not contagious) and looking to do *something* social. Obviously, choose people and groups who would benefit from reading the book, and offer to do signings at the time of the discussion, encouraging sales.
3. Talk to your local university and see if you can come as a guest speaker in some relevant classes, particularly extension school classes which tend to have larger enrollments.
4. The discussion circles are something which could also occur online, THINQon being an obvious example (there were already several book groups
post post ; or you could try to organize a series of topics around issues in the book. As a counterbalance to the theory, it might be nice to bring people together to discuss personal stories; everybody likes stories and it's something people can immediately relate to).
I would balance this with offline stuff in the measure that the offline stuff is enjoyable for you rather than a chore.
5. Are we talking about the love-in-later-life book? If so, why not try
to start some kind of grassroots "second valentine's" day, on some
suggestively chosen day in the fall? Try to encourage people over
whatever age to get out and go on dates and meet others on this day.
Everybody likes new holidays. Everybody also likes t-shirts.
If your posts are any indication you've got a great style and I imagine you're an excellent author. My advice would be to try and look at the situation objectively and learn from it without taking it too personally; just take things in stride and try to figure out how this can be the spur to new and exciting adventures.
Well, hope this helps.
