I was washing a few windows today. When I finished from the outside of the house, I went in thinking my work was finished. But as I looked at the same windows from inside, insidious streaks spread over the glass. Am I that bad of a window washer?

It made me think about a time when I was a freshman in college. A friend invited me over to do some work around some rich guy’s house. He was rich to me, at least.

The guy came out and told me to wash the outside windows. I said ‘ok’ and grabbed the Windex and some newspaper and started at it. That was the first time I had ever washed a window in my life. The streaks. I couldn’t get rid of the streaks. I kept spraying and rubbing the window over and over and I just seemed to be making things worse. After a half hour of getting hardly anything done, the owner came over, shook his head, and told me to go rake leaves. He finished his own windows. I sulked as I raked the leaves, feeling like an idiot. When our couple hours of work were finished, he paid us, but for some reason, I was never invited back for the easy money.

The point? You can’t expect to be an expert the first time you do something. It’s a learning process.

As my second novel just released, I thought back to how different it was when my first novel released. Let’s compare.

On the day I released my first novel, Beauty Rising, I had no active blog, I had no Facebook page, I had no reviews, nobody had added it to their Goodreads’ shelf – and I thought I had a good marketing plan at the time.

Yesterday, as I released my second novel, The Recluse Storyteller, I have been blogging regularly for 10 months now, I have a Facebook Author Page, I already have 5 reviews which have posted on-line, more than 100 people have added it to their Goodreads’ shelf, I have a marketing budget with targeted ads coming out on Goodreads, Facebook, and other places, it is being sold on multiple formats from many different retailers – BUT I still get the feeling that when I’m ready to release #3 that I’m going to look back at this release as being woefully inadequate.

What does this have to do with my window washing? Well, not much, because I obviously haven’t learned to wash windows properly yet.

However, it did illustrate something that is perfectly clear to me – I want to learn from my experiences and get better at marketing every time I release a new book.

That’s all I can do, strive to be the best writer and promoter that I can be. After that, the results aren’t up to me anymore.