Last week my book, The Asset, was finally live on Amazon. I began to go through my book launch checklist to begin to promote it, when suddenly my desktop computer (an iMac) began to crash.
It wasn’t a hard crash, the monitor would just go black. The operating system would still be running, I could hear it all working, I just couldn’t see it. Black out city! By pressing the start button a few times, I would get the display to come back, but it would again go black. This was on was supposed to be day one of my book launch, but the display of the monitor kept going down.
I was already an expert on this, since the same thing happened in October. I had it fixed and all was well, until the day of my book launch. My computer isn’t even there years old, so I was very annoyed. It was so frustrating that I even unleashed a punch at my computer. Stupid, I know, but it did make me feel better.
I ended up taking it back to the Apple store. They were going to do several diagnostics tests for a few days to really pinpoint the problem. The Apple guy thought it could be three things, the price of the fix ranging from less than $100 to over $550. It’s getting to the point where I’m thinking I should just buy a new one, but I decided to move forward. My computer is still at the Apple store as I write this blog post.
I had prepared for it, I back up my computer with Time Machine, so I had access to my files via Dropbox (I love Dropbox). So after two wasted days, I fired up my old MacBookPro laptop. I was finally to ready to try the book launch thing again, but the computers gods weren’t done with me yet. But this time it’s my hoarding ways.
You see, my laptop is old and the hard drive was full. I couldn’t even create a new empty folder, needless to say, updating my Scrivener and Word/Excel software with the latest version was a no go. I checked the hard drive and I had 0KB of space available, ZERO. So now I had to figure out what I could dump so I could have room to move and speed up the darn thing.
I haven’t really used that laptop in over two years. I use my iMac at home and my iPad when I’m out and about, so I just haven’t needed to use my laptop, until now.
So now I find myself trying to get my laptop to work again. I start going though the files and applications. Then it dawned on me. I haven’t really used this thing in two years, and I only recalled a few times that I had to go in there to find something. I had basically become a hoarder with my computer. That’s when I went into extreme hoarding therapy mode. I removed several applications that I hadn’t used since 2007-2009! It’s obvious I don’t need them anymore, so uninstall and delete.
Then I began to go throw the load of files I had hoarded over the years. At first I tried to go through everything, then said, forget it. I backed everything up (yes still hoarding, but hey, baby steps) and I just trashed it all:
I took that photograph already in progress. I ended up deleting over 80,000 files. And it felt, GREAT!
After the house cleaning I emptied the trash bin, and I rebooted the old laptop, and now I had 70GB of space to play with! I went from 0KB to 70GB.
Finally, I was ready to move forward with my book launch. I’ve lost several days with the computer problems, but I decided not to fret about it. I lost a week of my initial 30 days of being considered a “new book” on Amazon, but there is nothing I can do about that now. I just need to push forward having lost that time.
Needless to say my first book launch hasn’t started as I had hoped, but stay tuned, I’ll be updating this blog with details of the first thirty days of my book being published on Amazon.
Lesson here, don’t be a computer hoarder, and don’t worry if your book launch doesn’t go smoothly. The important part is to get your book published and then promote it for the long term, not just during the frenzy of a launch.
My name is Alan Petersen I write mysteries and thrillers. You can check out my Amazon page