Take It Slow, It’ll Work Itself Out Fine
Taking in the sunset at my favorite secluded beach in Costa Rica, a cherished spot where impatience would have a hard time ever gaining a toehold.
June 12, 2026
It hasn’t been a bad week. It just played out differently than I imagined.
Instead of celebrating the climb up the hot new releases chart, I’m sitting on the sofa, watching the rain fall as I type out a blog post quoting Guns N’ Roses lyrics on that sometimes elusive mental state of patience.
The launch has been idling in neutral for seven days. Zero dollars of my allocated ad budget were spent for indecipherable reasons that I’m working to uncover through an extremely-corporate escalation process. But I don’t want to dwell on that in this post, the inner non-workings of the marketing factory. So let me touch on the positive and then share a bit on how I’m handling it all. I think that’s more interesting.
Okay, let’s look at a bit of the positive. First of all, Jake Doe Burning Bright has a lucky thirteen reviews on Amazon for a 5.0 rating and eleven reviews on Goodreads for a 4.55 rating. Those are incredible numbers. The Amazon rating will surely drop very soon, but still, even this early, they point to the vastly most important thing in all this: Jake Doe’s story is resonating with people. All the rest is just cornflakes.
Some readers are enjoying it a whole lot like Stacey Coombe in the UK who gave the book SIX STARS in a TikTok post. Stacey had this to say in her review: “This book is perfection and I can't wait to read the next one to find out what happens to Jake and his chosen family.” That warms a writer’s heart, Stacey.
Also in the positive camp is an amazing “unboxing reel” posted by book influencer Kim Argyle out of Utah. Kim has almost 90,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. If you aren’t yet familiar with Kim, prepare to be gobsmacked.
Kim is a bundle of sassy energy, intellectual prowess, and comedic dexterity. She only started her channels in late 2025 but has a rapidly growing and devoted group of followers. Kim says she’s starting med school in the fall. We’ll see. She might be burning too bright as a book influencer to leave this gig behind. After researching dozens of book influencers, I identified Kim Argyle as the perfect person to introduce Jake Doe to the world. Somehow I captured her attention, and on Saturday we made it happen. Here’s the unboxing on Instagram. If you don’t have Instagram, you may have better luck watching it here on TikTok.
Amazing, Kimberlyn! Thank you again. And please don’t feed the mangoes to the kitties…
I then got more good news on the book influencer front today. A young man in Europe, who has a very large following and mostly reads and recommends classics, finished reading Jake Doe Burning Bright this morning and plans to post a reel review in a couple of days. I don’t want to say more than that at this point, but I think it could be big news for the trajectory of the book.
Still, it was a disappointing week in many ways as the book effectively failed to get out of the starting gate on Amazon. So let me return to patience. I’ve found myself over the past few days feeling powerless and frustrated. Those are feelings I haven’t had in a long while.
Writing and publishing the book have been a bit like a fairytale where all the elements just seemed to drop into place at precisely the right moment. Some people describe this feeling as a flow state. It’s often felt to me like someone else’s hands other than my own were on Jake Doe’s wheel - like something beyond inspiration was working through me. Maybe I’ll have more to share on that down the line… But those magical beans all fell to the earth this week when the realities of audience targeting, impressions, click-thru-rates, bounce rates, cart abandonment, and page reads all crashed back into my life. Hello old friends!
So I’ve had to dig deep for some calm and patience. Once upon a time, I would have said a prayer that asked for this patience to be delivered to me. But with age and experience, I’ve learned to turn inward, to melt into the patience that I hold - that we all hold - within, and then say a little prayer of thanks for what already is. This inner patience is coupled with a certainty that Jake Doe the novel is on its own journey, one that I may be able to nudge forwards or sideways a bit, but that ultimately it will find its current and float its own path into the world regardless of what Edward Trimble, the book marketer, does to help or hinder it.
But I’d still love to give Jake a nice push, or summon a strong gust of wind, to move him out into the flowing waters a bit sooner. So I’ll keep at it.
Note: the caption photo is me lounging on one of my favorite beaches in Costa Rica at sunset, a place where impatience could never gain a toehold. I don’t know if Evie’s ever visited that beach. Maybe we’ll join her there one day.