My Book is Real Now: Preorders Are Live
Today is August 21, and I can finally say the sentence I’ve been waiting almost six months to say: the book is done. Really done. Not “done except for one more pass” done. Done done.
Perfect Enough: A Memoir will be available September 1 in three formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback. But you don’t have to wait…You can preorder it today!
I want to tell you why that matters, because I didn’t fully understand it myself until I started this process. Preorders aren't just for readers counting down to launch day. They’re a signal to retailers that this book is worth paying attention to before launch day even happens. As a debut author with no track record and no built-in audience, that signal is everything. It’s the difference between a book that gets a little push and a book that gets none. If you’ve been waiting to grab a copy, an order today helps the most.
Now, about those six months…
I finished writing this book more than once. I finished it, revised it, finished it again, revised it again, and somewhere around draft thirty-four (You think I’m kidding?) I began to wonder if I’d simply been finding new ways to rearrange the same sentences forever. So, I held my breath, sent it off, and ordered physical proofs so I could hold the actual object in my hands for the first time.
And found errors. Of course I did. Sheesh.
Not big ones. Nothing that would break a sentence or confuse a reader. Just the small kind that only show up once a book stops being a file on your laptop and becomes a real, physical thing you can flip through with a pen in your hand. The kind where you’ve read a sentence forty times and somehow never noticed it was missing a word until it’s printed on actual paper and staring back at you. I won’t tell you what they were, partly because they’re fixed now and partly because I’d like to maintain a shred of dignity here.
But today, they’re fixed. Today, for real, the book is done.
If you’ve been following this process along with me, you already know it wasn’t a straight line. There were two publishing deals that didn’t work out before I decided to do this myself. There were rewrites I didn’t see coming. There was a lot of “just one more pass.” And now there’s a preorder link, and a launch date, and a book that’s actually going to exist in the world in eleven days.
So what I’m asking is, if this is a book you’ve been meaning to grab, please preorder it now rather than waiting for launch day. It genuinely helps more than people realize. And if you know someone who might connect with a story about learning to loosen your grip on motherhood, on control, on the mistaken belief that you can manage your way through everything if you just try hard enough, tell them about it. Send them the link. That’s how a debut book finds its readers, one person telling another person.
That especially includes the parents raising a kid on the spectrum, or dealing with a diagnosis that rewrites what you thought parenting was going to look like. This book didn’t start as a book about autism. It became one anyway, because going through this journey with my son taught me who I actually wanted to be as a mother. If you’re in that world, or you know someone who is, I wrote this for you too.
September 1 is coming. I can’t wait for you to read it.