Personally, I believe that the experts finally got something
right: As difficult and exhausting as writing can be, nothing compares
to the challenges and sheer misery of marketing one's self.
Just the huge numbers of electronic avenues make this experience quite daunting. (I run into that word quite often when I discuss trying to sell one's work). And as many of us have come to realize, it's not just the sheer numbers of Internet sites, it's the TIME you need to spend on them to make yourself credible. That's the REAL killer. I'll spend at minimum, an hour agonizing over THIS composition.
Plus, here you are, all excited and duly proud of yourself for having completed something that you devoted weeks, months, even years to and you can't even get your sister to buy one and give it a five star rating. You should be having this HUGE celebration with all your friends. Instead, you're fumbling around like a teenager in the back seat of your old man's Chevy, trying to add some kind of Pin to a Board on a site that you REALLY don't care about. And it's TWO O'CLOCK IN THE DAMN MORNING!
But you've checked your numbers and you're 697,364 in Amazon's Best Seller Rank. So you text and you tweet. You create a fan page. You blog. You Skype. You Pin, and you Tumble. You contact every "friend" you have, and have them contact every friend they have, and every friend they have, and so on down the line. "Yes," they say, "I'll get me a copy of that new book you just published. I'm gonna read it, rate it, and give it a whole passel of stars." Two days later and now you're at 798,621.
And so you text and tweet some more looking for support and ideas. But as much advice as I get; I write. I consider myself a writer. Maybe not a very lucid one, but a writer nonetheless. I have stories inside of me. Having them stay there while I attend to other business only makes them fester and this will ultimately lead to some really bad juju.
By nature I am not a tweeter or a texter, a Pinner, or Tumbler. I don't try to StumbleOnto anything. Don't much care for Skyping, and I secretly hate all of my "friends" on Facebook.
And so here I sit, trying to promote my book on one more probably useless site, and it's now 3 o'clock in the damn morning. I just keep repeating to myself, "I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer...
Just the huge numbers of electronic avenues make this experience quite daunting. (I run into that word quite often when I discuss trying to sell one's work). And as many of us have come to realize, it's not just the sheer numbers of Internet sites, it's the TIME you need to spend on them to make yourself credible. That's the REAL killer. I'll spend at minimum, an hour agonizing over THIS composition.
Plus, here you are, all excited and duly proud of yourself for having completed something that you devoted weeks, months, even years to and you can't even get your sister to buy one and give it a five star rating. You should be having this HUGE celebration with all your friends. Instead, you're fumbling around like a teenager in the back seat of your old man's Chevy, trying to add some kind of Pin to a Board on a site that you REALLY don't care about. And it's TWO O'CLOCK IN THE DAMN MORNING!
But you've checked your numbers and you're 697,364 in Amazon's Best Seller Rank. So you text and you tweet. You create a fan page. You blog. You Skype. You Pin, and you Tumble. You contact every "friend" you have, and have them contact every friend they have, and every friend they have, and so on down the line. "Yes," they say, "I'll get me a copy of that new book you just published. I'm gonna read it, rate it, and give it a whole passel of stars." Two days later and now you're at 798,621.
And so you text and tweet some more looking for support and ideas. But as much advice as I get; I write. I consider myself a writer. Maybe not a very lucid one, but a writer nonetheless. I have stories inside of me. Having them stay there while I attend to other business only makes them fester and this will ultimately lead to some really bad juju.
By nature I am not a tweeter or a texter, a Pinner, or Tumbler. I don't try to StumbleOnto anything. Don't much care for Skyping, and I secretly hate all of my "friends" on Facebook.
And so here I sit, trying to promote my book on one more probably useless site, and it's now 3 o'clock in the damn morning. I just keep repeating to myself, "I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer...