Tuesday Morning. May 25th 2021. 9am. I finally got the email that Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital — an illustrated children’s book for both kids and adults about Venture Capital — was available for purchase on Amazon just five hours before I was going to walk across the San Diego State graduation stage. I quickly ordered five author copies. Getting ready for graduation was hectic! I split time between investor calls, fielding emails, replying to wonderful congratulations, and meeting my roommates’ parents.
I dashed off a single tweet and sent as many thank you’s as possible to folks that were sharing and buying my book. Our book. I wrote Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital initially because I wanted to explain to my parents why I loved venture capital so much and how it worked. It blossomed into a movement to include a crowdfunding campaign, and my brother brought it to life with wonderful illustrations. Over 100 copies of Seed to Harvest were bought all over the US, Canada, Mexico. Some were even requesting the book in multiple translations — all in the first two days. It couldn’t have been better.
Until Thursday.
I was picking up a bottle of champagne to celebrate both the successful book release and my graduation when I get a text from my team,
“Hey Paige, there’s a slight issue with the letters y,b,f, and a, in the print version of the book… I’m on facetime now with the designer trying to troubleshoot. It affects 9 pages”
My stomach dropped as I pulled over, frantically asking for more information. We’d had some issues with the Kindle Digital Publishing platform not accepting our formatting and trim size & had been trying to get the book uploaded for about a week. I unfortunately hadn’t seen a proof before we launched the book.
I sucked my breath in as images of my book came across one by one missing letters on nine pages. Tears started to well up in my eyes as I thought of people getting my book for the first time with such obvious mistakes. I walked into the store, my mind racing with all the negative possibilities of what people would say.
I called Justin Potts, an early supporter of the book and a founder himself, since he had tweeted about receiving Seed to Harvest. He paged through the book over FaceTime, and my heart sank as I watched pages flip by missing a few letters on the pages with speech bubbles. He reassured me, you could still see the outline of the words. His brilliant idea was to call this initial run of books the Coloring Book Edition because readers could fill in their own letters.
This change of perspective forced me to think deeply about how I handle hiccups, missteps, obstacles in shipping products, and in business. No launch will ever be perfect. I’ll say that again: no launch is perfect. In the grand scheme of things — I think it’s magical that this limited run, the Coloring Book Edition, will remind people of just that. My friend likes to remind me of the age-old truth — real artists ship. In my eyes, it’s better to ship early and continue to iterate than wait to ship until things are perfect.
Matthew McConaughey talks about how he knows he’s in trouble when he’s lost his wink. His lightness. His sense of humor. His perspective. I lost my wink for a bit today, but Justin helped me get it back. Having a lens of humor in trying times, especially like when I found out my book was missing letters, is key to getting through tough times with a positive frame of mind.
My incredible team quickly sent me an updated copy of the manuscript with new fonts. I updated Seed to Harvest’s manuscript, closed my computer and headed out for the night. I got to have a wonderful traditional Hungarian goulash dinner with my best friend’s family overlooking the ocean in San Diego as we laughed about stories from our times together in college.
What’s a couple missing letters if I have loving friends, family, supporters, and a mission I care deeply about? There will be hiccups and missteps and obstacles along the way — but I know embracing imperfection and these bumps along the road with a positive mindset and a sense of humor will better equip me for times when the going gets tough.
Life has a funny way of throwing a wrench in things and letting you know, “Hey, it’s time to lighten up. Time to get your wink back.” My wrench happened to be five particularly important letters that Amazon decided not to print in a book that was a labour of love for not only me, but also my brother Owen, the wonderful illustrator.
This limited edition “coloring book” copy will only be available for the next 24 hours; we’ve uploaded a new copy of the book which will be available soon with [hopefully] full fonts. To those of you who were among the first 100 people to order this book, I appreciate your support.
If you’re unhappy with the mistakes and would like a fresh copy, I totally understand. Please return the book to Amazon & order a new one here – you’ll get refunded, and I offer my sincerest apologies. If you’d like to keep yours and fill in the missing letters with colorful ones instead – please send me a picture! And if you choose to keep it and color in the mistakes, I hope this edition serves as a reminder to build what you love, ship it to the world, and live with a little “wink.”
