Psst! You there. Yeah you! The one reading this blog. Answer me this...how do you do it? How do you find the time to go trolling around and read this stuff? Tell me, please! I really need to know! I can barely scrape the time to do an entry, and yet you somehow found time to be reading it!
Now, don't get me wrong. I REALLY appreciate you being here. Honest! I just don't have the faintest idea how you're able to do it. Share your SECRET! Pretty please?
I bet by now you're wondering why, if I have so little time, do I even do a blog? Necessity, kind reader, purely for necessity! As an author, I am more obligated than ever to market myself as well as my works. With business being what it is anymore, all marketing efforts are on the shoulders of the authors instead of on the publisher. Only the big names get a marketing budget and possibly professionals to do it for them. Little fishes like me are on our own!
With the World Wide Web, marketing possibilities have widened. But you can stretch yourself really thin that way, because there are just too many to pursue! A website is a must, gotta have it, no choice. A little changing content like news and whatnot is good too, so people have a reason to keep coming back. (Sample chapters are a must as well, so people can get a feel for your writing. If you can pitch in a free short story or too, even better!) Blogs allow for continuous new content, if you can get into the discipline of doing it at least a few times a month or more. I won't even get into the tons of groups in places like Yahoo, Yahoo 360, Ning, Beepo, Frapper, My Space, Live Journal, etc that are out there on the net where you can post info, links, blogs, forums, and who knows what not. Then you have your marketing groups, specific genre marketing groups, publisher marketing groups, newsletters, online interviews, guest blogging, the list is endless!
So maybe now you can see why I am asking how you find the time to read this! I need your Secret! I know I don't have any time to go read posts what with trying to do all this stuff, go to work, keep the family and pets happy, carve a little time for myself (Writers need relaxation too!), and heck, make time to WRITE! lol.
So if you would, take pity on me and tell me how to do it! Even better, if you have a formula by which I can either redo time, replicate myself, or get the powers of Superman, do share! I'll appreciate you forever!:P
Being an author is not the cakewalk people think it is! Eek!
P.S. If you still have time, come on over to the site. I have tons of sample chapters and some free reads too! :P
I'm a busy guy, yet I manage to keep up with a few hundred blogs and podcasts. Yes, I'm not kidding.
ReplyDeleteHow do I do it? RSS reading. That's the only way. I don't have time to go check out all of those website. So I look for the RSS bug and put everything into NetNewsWire. Lots of folks use Google Reader, too.
I check my RSS feeds at least three times a day: first thing in the morning, at lunch, and then before I call it quits. Very easy.
E.
I use Thunderbird at my home to pull the rss feeds. You could also try bloglines.com then you can access your feeds from anywhere.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what the above are talking about, haha, I just have little to do at the moment.
ReplyDeleteMy mum wants me to make her a blog so I made one of my own in advance just so I know how to do it.
Now that I think about it though, as a writer (aspiring to be published one day), you are correct in that we need a place to market our goods on the net...so dissillusioning in a sense that though; the commercialisation of a pure art.