I Have No Idea How to do That & I’m Not Supposed to

  • By: Jessica Faust | Date: Oct 19 2021

As BookEnds continues to grow so does our team and support staff. In addition to the public faces of BookEnds, we have a strong support network for each step of the process. These include people handling contract negotiations, bookkeeping, social media, rights, and a million other things that go into making both a successful business and agency.

Thanks to all of them, BookEnds agents have more free time to do what they do best. Agent. And I have more free time to spend growing BookEnds, my own clients, and my agents.

This also means there are a lot of things I don’t know how to do at BookEnds. Things I’ve hired other people to do and trust and rely on them to get done and get it done well. And you know what? They’re damn good at it. Better than I would be.

Growing Your Business

As you grow your own publishing career one of the hardest things you might need to do is let go. If you were previously self-published you had your hand in everything from the cover, to the posting, to the editing. As you grow though, you might need to start trusting others to do what they’re experts in. You might have to let go.

As an author who spent years querying you had great control over your book at all times. Once you have an agent it’s time to let go of the research and nitty-gritty of the submission process and trust your agent. You know, the expert you hired to do that. Enjoy the extra time you now have to write your book and promote, and create.

In the past five years, BookEnds has grown ten-fold. Actually more than ten-fold and I’ve had the absolute joy of being able to let go.

No longer do I need to have my hands in every bit of BookEnds minutia. Oh yes, I spend a lot of time doing a lot of things, but not those that someone else does better.

Not only does this allow me to do more of what I love, but it’s allowed BookEnds to be stronger because there are experts in every area who have made me smarter and better. They’ve brought in new systems and they know a heckuva lot that I don’t. And now, there are things I used to do, that I no longer know how to do.

Trusting things to other people can be nerve-wracking but the truth is “doing it yourself” is not working smarter or faster. It’s all ego.

I’ve learned so much from my support team and my agents. Each of them making me better and making BookEnds better. Not knowing how to do that (whatever that is) has been freeing, empowering, and enriching.