Today I concluded the free book promotion for my novel ‘When Truth Awakens’. Whether anyone who took me up on the offer decides to give it a review, I’ll just have to wait and see.
I always have the nagging feeling that I could (should) be doing more to market the book, and the fact remains that I am forever on the lookout for new ideas and methods of doing so. Implementing any type of promotion invariably takes longer than I thought it would. Anyone who has self-published from square one, without a platform, knows exactly what I mean.
No matter what your personal financial budget is, your time budget remains constant – 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week. Day job, commuting to and fro, family responsibilities, errands, shopping and finally sleep must fit into 24 and 168 hour cycles. If we’re lucky and we’ve budgeted correctly there’s some time left over to write, or market what we’ve written.
Just like with the financial budget we borrow from next week’s time budget, only to realize that we must repay with interest. This may result in several days of lost writing time. Some just give up against relentless odds. Others, reaffirmed by the daily sanity check of staring deeply into our own eyes in the bathroom mirror (the absence of spontaneous rage or tears constitutes a pass for me) press on in the pursuit of their writing goal.
Dedicate yourself to a certain activity for a long enough period of time, then it’s no longer a question of what you do, it’s a question of who you are.
TC