There are 24 hours in the day. You use up about 8 sleeping. Another hour for a shit, shower and shave and maybe 2 in the pursuit of sustenance. Kick in another hour for aimless wandering and the occasional sweep of the vacuum cleaner and, if you don’t have a day job, that leaves you with a mere 12 to write.
But wait! After a succession of 12 hour sprints writing and editing, editing and writing, sticking in the occasional work on your query letter, researching agents, researching publishers, addressing envelopes, walking to and fro to the mail box, you finally get lucky enough to be published.
Guess what? You can kiss those 12 hours of writing time goodbye.
Your writing time will shrink to 1 or 2, if you’re lucky, and you cut your sleep time to 6 hours and let your household chores go to hell and let what little social life you may have eked out in the past slip away so that you become a total recluse. Letting your beard and/or your underarm/leg hair grow and cutting out the whole shower thing might gain you another half-hour. I mean, you’ve become a recluse, right, a slave to the promo. Unless you’re doing readings in public, who cares if you’re hairy as a gorilla and smell like an overripe banana?
Stealing The Marbles was published on September 1st of this year. Since then, I doubt I’ve gotten a full 24 hours of writing in on my new novel. If I do manage to finish it and it gets published, here is one thing I won’t do the next promo time around: create a stand-along website for it.
I wasted hours creating a website for Stealing The Marbles, not to mention 22 bucks for the domain name and, despite my promo efforts, it’s gotten like no traffic. Well, it got a lot of comments about penis extenders and breast implants and links to pharmaceutical sites up the wazoo but I doubt any of those folks actually read anything on the site and probably haven’t got a clue what the Parthenon Marbles are much less care about their return to Greece. And, considering the generally poor grammar and misspellings, one has to wonder if spammers can even read. They sure as hell can’t write.
So, don’t waste your time with a book specific site. Instead, create an author site and put all the book’s information there. If you do decide to get a domain name for your book, not entirely a bad idea, link it to your book’s promo page on your author site. Make sure you have a good spam filter in place.
I’ll have more on this whole promo nightmare next week. In the mean time, why don’t you hop on down to your local indie bookstore and buy a copy of Stealing The Marbles. Or, you could get it on Amazon HERE, Amazon.co.uk: Tree Book, eBook, Mobipocket HERE and B&N HERE.
buy his book. you will love it, and hopefully you will be helping him to free up some promo time, so he can write more. because trust me, we want him to write more. 🙂
Well stated, EJ. Half the stuff we do for our books seems to be a big waste of time. And the older we get, the greater the urgency to write and publish ‘just one more!’
I wish you great good luck with Stealing the Marbles. It’s an excellent novel.
Skip – it get’s easier, it does. You’ll find the writing time and the promo shite will fall into place. 🙂
Write damn you! I want to read your next book.
xx
I hope so. I need to get back to writing. I’ve got like 6 possible reviews in the works but haven’t heard back from any of them, including the 2 Joan set up with Book Wenches and Un:Bound. This is a crazy business we’re in.