There just isn't enough time in the day. Not if you have a new book out. Used to be you would do a few signings and some radio interviews, maybe a little television. Not exactly a leisure pace, but you felt like marketing a book had some tempo, some sense of progression. Now there is just not enough time in the day. The online beast of publishing has reared it's head and will not go away. And he is never satisfied. Start your day at six AM. Start with your blog. I am the Editor in Chief for Speak Without Interruption http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/ and I am a National Examiner writer on National Culture http://www.nationalexaminer.com/ and I write my own column http://www.williamhazelgrove.blogspot.com/ called The View From Hemingway's Attic. This takes about two hours and then I have to get twittering. This is sending out bits of information for my twitter followers. Now we are almost four hours in and I had just finished the first wave of writing and twittering.But it is time to do a podcast of my latest essay. This takes another half hour. Now it it time to return emails. This takes another thirty minutes. Now it is time to consider bloggers who will review my new book. It is noon.
The feeling of never being able to get it all done is omnipresent. There are so many ways to go for the modern cyber author that it can just stop you from doing anything. It is a lot like being at the crossroads of a highway with ten different options. You could concentrate on getting reviews from the thousands of book bloggers. This alone could burn up your entire day. How about linking your website with other websites? Another time burner that could easily cost you hours. Of course you could look toward mainstream media and concentrate on sending books to the newspapers or television shows. Or you could get into Search Engine Optimization and spend your day bookmarking your blogs and sites and trying to determine what keywords will bring you the most traffic. Don't even think of going on Facebook or Myspace. There is the potential to get sidetracked into social networking and nothing will get accomplished.
This is something new and no one really knows what the result will be. It is all too new. We all hear of the books that become bestsellers because of bloggers picking a book and it takes off like a rocket. When my novel, Rocket Man came out I envisioned the cyber world getting behind me in exactly this way. It has worked for me, but I didn't figure on the days without end where you could literally be online twenty four seven and still not get it all done. I just hope there will be an end of some sort soon. This has been going on for six months and some day I will have to start writing again.
William Elliott Hazelgrove's new novel, Rocket Man was just published by Pantonne Press and chosen as the Best Book of 2008. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
The feeling of never being able to get it all done is omnipresent. There are so many ways to go for the modern cyber author that it can just stop you from doing anything. It is a lot like being at the crossroads of a highway with ten different options. You could concentrate on getting reviews from the thousands of book bloggers. This alone could burn up your entire day. How about linking your website with other websites? Another time burner that could easily cost you hours. Of course you could look toward mainstream media and concentrate on sending books to the newspapers or television shows. Or you could get into Search Engine Optimization and spend your day bookmarking your blogs and sites and trying to determine what keywords will bring you the most traffic. Don't even think of going on Facebook or Myspace. There is the potential to get sidetracked into social networking and nothing will get accomplished.
This is something new and no one really knows what the result will be. It is all too new. We all hear of the books that become bestsellers because of bloggers picking a book and it takes off like a rocket. When my novel, Rocket Man came out I envisioned the cyber world getting behind me in exactly this way. It has worked for me, but I didn't figure on the days without end where you could literally be online twenty four seven and still not get it all done. I just hope there will be an end of some sort soon. This has been going on for six months and some day I will have to start writing again.
William Elliott Hazelgrove's new novel, Rocket Man was just published by Pantonne Press and chosen as the Best Book of 2008. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf
