When plans fall apart…

I am known as a planner in some circles, and while that’s not untrue, what is unsaid is how often those plans backfire. I do plan things, often overthinking them to the point of exhaustion, which makes when things fall apart even more frustrating.

Last night I found a photo that made me laugh about my original “book release plan”.

This first image is the original “phase 1” release plan all the way back in 2018. I spent almost a year planning this release, gathering book covers, and developing the plan dating back to 2017, but 2018 was when it all started to coalesce after spending a year and countless hours doing research.

It makes me laugh because while you can buy every one of these books, I only ended up using THREE of these covers, and these 18 books ended up being released as SIX books (well seven including one freebie) after the first disastrous launch in 2019. Technically, I did launch the first six books starting from the top right in 2019, but it was a massacre, and I quickly pulled everything down and regrouped.

I licked my wounds for several months, and after being in the worst depression in years, I started to pick up the pieces. If you went to Amazon right now, this is how those 18 novels would look.

Completely different, and that’s the point, really.

That original plan was great, but it was massively flawed. I just didn’t know it at the time. It took eight failed launches and then two successful Kickstarters to figure that out and make these books work.

No matter how much research you do, how much planning, and how meticulous you are, you need to plan for some amount of elasticity, because, as they say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

The success of a plan is really predicated on how well you can pivot when everything falls apart. Most people see a plan as a perfect encapsulation of what will happen, and while sometimes a plan comes together, and who doesn’t love that, usually it will fall apart in ways you couldn’t even predict, and in those moments are when you really earn your keep.