I love to write, I really do. It helps to empty my mind, it makes me smile, sometimes I can make bad things happen to characters and magically fix the world. But what I don't love is the marketing and promoting.
I have no issue with taking time to edit, well, except for the lack of time. Writing is awesome some days and harder on others. But what is always a grind is the marketing. And let's face it, I want what I write to be read, so it needs to be marketed.
If I'm having a good writing day I can write several thousand words in 1-3 projects. If I'm riding the struggle bus, I can still usually get at least 1,000 words in something. I usually try to edit every day after something has sat at least two days. I find if I edit sooner and I tend to read the words as I meant them to be, not necessarily how they are actually written on the page. Typically I edit once for content (does the scene even make sense?) and then 2-4 times for the details, fluency, grammar, typos, etc.
The rest of my day (aside from life tasks like housework, family, animal care, etc) is promoting and marketing. The. Rest. Of. The. Day.
How the day in the life of this author starts
I usually start the day marketing via Twitter. I have a sentence or two for each of my books that I can copy and past into a tweet along with the link. Then, I play around with new hooks and hash tags. Then, I respond to my notifications. I can usually manage this while the coffee starts entering my soul.
Family interruptions (and pets) mean I am still not ready to write and be interrupted constantly, so there is a good chance that I will hop onto TikTok or Facebook to check video views, remove bogus followers, and respond to comments. I have no idea how t crack the TikTok algorithm so that is a whole other ride on the struggle bus. I don't actually enjoy watching TikTok so it's no real surprise that I don't do well on it.
By this time hopefully all living creatures have settled, the dishwasher or the washing machine is going, and just maybe I can write for an hour or so. Or, maybe not. But this is when I tend to get 800-1,000 words written for something. I now have a handwritten calendar of what I have managed to publish, so I can see where to focus next. I am a
firm believer in scheduling ahead as life tends to get in the way of consistent writing time.
The rest of my day then is a mix between caregiver, household tasks, writing and promoting. It is easier to access the feature of Instagram from my phone, but the videos that I create are done on my laptop...Either some thing gets ignored (yup, fell into that with IG) or it's time consuming to upload the videos to the cloud or email to download them to my phone so I can upload them to Instagram. Of course if I do that, I can post to IG and Facebook simultaneously which I can't do from Instagram on my computer... Same deal for Pinterest.
For a while most of my promotion time was spent between TikTok and Facebook. I neglected my Instagram and Pinterest platforms and feel that now.
I joined BookFunnel and soon after moved from the free version to a paid version,. This allows me to easily cross promote a variety of genres with other authors. For example, there are about 50 Kindle Vella authors working together on this promotion, and other genre specific promotions like this one for children's books.
So where is the balance?
My goals in May are: First, to have the full month scheduled out by the second week; and Second, to balance my marketing/promoting across all the platforms. Some day, I'll have enough to invest in someone to do marketing for me so I can focus mostly on writing and editing.
Please support my social media presence on: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and Pinterest! Here are my links.
By the way, a new episode of Parallel Worlds dropped today! From now on there will be new episodes on Sundays and Thursdays!
So come find me on Social Media, I would love to have a conversation with my readers!