Is it best to be everywhere??

As everyone knows....or if you don't know....pull up a seat and listen close....authors need to do about 99% of their own promotion these days. Unless you're Stephen king or JK Rowling....

But the rest of us need to put our names and books out there...entice readers to spend their hard-earned dollars on our book. Social media has made this relatively easy. There are so many places to put your face and books: Facebook groups and author pages, Twitter, blogs, Goodreads, Yahoo groups, LinkedIn, and a million other places.

But what is best?? Where should you spend your time? Is more better?

I am lucky enough to stay home and not work outside of my home. I have one child home with me and another who is in school full day. I get a decent amount of time each day to work and network. But I still have many interruptions and responsibilities. So it's not always all that great. I do what I can. But that means I have to limit the time I spend doing Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, etc... I could spend hours and hours each day doing that. But that means I get little or no time to actually write.

And what about the working writer who has to do the 9-5 all day and only has a couple hours each evening to do all their writing related things???? They can't spend all of their little time networking and promoting. Or they'd never have anything new to promote.

So my question today is...does it really pay to have your face and hand in EVERYTHING out there???

I do what I can...I think I'd rather do a couple things, and really do them right, than try and visit a million places each day. But I have days where I feel like I'm not doing enough. that I should be doing more. But then my work in progress suffers. There's only so many hours in the day and I can't neglect my family (and I don't want to). And as much as I would loooooove it...I cannot survive on an hour of sleep.

Lastly today, if you can help me out...I have gotten my survey up and running!!! Yay!! It is for readers ONLY, not writers, so please please please send the link to anyone you think may help be willing to help me out!! I will be posting the results here on my blog in a few weeks!! I think the info will be very valuable for all authors!! Survey

Man I feel old sometimes....

So the other day I was driving in the car and Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" was on. Cool song, but I wasn't a huge PJ fan. Many of my friends in high school were. I was more into pop and hip hop...loved me some TLC!!

So anyway, the song ended and the DJ said that Pearl Jam has been together since 1991....TWENTY years.

I thought about that...twenty years. Wow....that's a long time. Wait a minute...holy crap!!!! I was a freshman in high school TWENTY years ago.

Wow.....

When you think of two decades, it sounds like such a long time...twenty years is a loooooong time. And it doesn't feel like I started high school twenty years ago. I don't feel like I'm as old as I am. I still have fun, I still go out and do things. I still wear awesome clothes and I think I am pretty cool!

But wow...when you hear stuff like this, it really puts time into perspective. Will the next twenty years of my life fly by and I'll be saying "Holy crap...I started high school 40 years ago???" My daughter will be almost 30, my son, almost 25. They'll be adults, no longer needing me. I wonder where my writing career will be then, how the publishing industry will have evolved. How will our world be different...will we have found cures for diseases and ways to better combat natural disasters? Will our environment be in a better place than it is now. I sure hope so.

But the most important question of all, will I still think I'm cool? :)

Ever feel torn??

I do...quite often. Mostly it has to do with my time and how it should be spent.

So yesterday was shopping day. I still went to the gym, but brought clothes and makeup and stuff so I didn't have to go home before running my errands (and you will not see me running errands in gym clothes and no makeup! Not gonna happen!) Hubby was off, so it was nice to have him there with me. We stopped at Toys R Us first, then had some lunch. Then we did both food stores. By the time we got home and put groceries away, I only had abut an hour and a half to be on the computer.

As most of you know, that amount of time can fly by in the blink of an eye. So I have to choose what I do carefully. Of course I checked email first.

But after that...I knew what I should have been doing. I should have been editing my manuscript, preparing it for submission. But I was a little tired. Didn't get much sleep the night before. I needed something that took less energy. I should have read blogs and commented and do all that networking stuff. *sigh* That felt really exhausting too. So I played around on Facebook and some message boards I visit, purely for fun.

And I felt guilty. I wasn't not doing what I should have been doing. So I went and wrote a blog about feeling torn.

How's your day?? Feeling torn at all???

Make sure you sign up for the Show Me the Love Blogfest!

Does time of day make a difference??

Okay, so I openly admit, I usually write posts and schedule them. It's very rare that I write a blog post and post it immediately. It is just a whole lot easier for me to write them when I have time, usually I do a few, and then schedule them. But I never know what time to schedule them for.

So I ask my fellow bloggers...what do you do?? Does the time of the post affect the number of people who read it??

Now, I am East coast, so my blogs post usually at 10 am EST. Obviously, that means they post even earlier in all the other US time zones. Do people read blogs that early?? Or do people read later in the day? If my post is too early, do you think it gets buried way down in reader's blog rolls?

I think I'm going to do a test. I'm going to try posting at different times and see if I get more or less responses!

I need to carve out more time!!!

Seems there's always something to take up my time and minimize the time I get to write and work on writing related projects.

There's the house and chores and dinner preparation, laundry, food shopping. There's always something we're prepping for: we have a costume party this weekend and I need to shop for supplies and make our costumes.

And then there's the kids. Every parent knows that the kids always need you the second you sit to do something for yourself. If my son didn't take a good nap every afternoon, I would not be sitting here typing this right now!

I hate to sound like I'm complaining, I'm really not. I know how lucky I am to get what I get. But I so badly want to make this career a success and I need to somehow find more time to give to it. But how do I do that without feeling guilty?? The most logical is after dinner. Hubby is here and able to take over parental duties 100%. I keep telling myself that if I worked a job out of the home, that is when I'd have to do it. But that is the only time we have as a family and that time is precious to me. The kids are only this age once. who knows how much longer we'll have before they won't want to play with us anymore.

I've tried the get up early thing...does not work for me. I am so not a morning person. I am better at night, but editing seriously makes me so sleepy!! I can usually write new stuff at night, but not edit.

Thanks for listening...I know there's tons of you out there who can relate!

To all the NANO's out there....

Wishing you all lots of luck as you start today!!!!

One of these years I WILL do it too!!! It always seems something comes up when November rolls around and I just can't set it aside to concentrate on it. This year it's editing. I am expecting my first round of copy edits from my editor soon...hopefully by mid month. I'd hate to be on a roll and then have to set it aside to concentrate on something that needs my immediate attention.

Or maybe that's an easy excuse. What would the harm be in getting something new started???

I don't know..... I'm working on editing some other projects too..so that I can submit them to my publisher. Plus I want to do another edit of my third novel so I can take it to The Write Stuff conference in March and pitch it to an agent.

And time...throw one more excuse on the pile. I really really need to carve out more writing time. I get a solid 3 hours on the computer in the afternoon when my son naps...but that time needs to be divided between email, networking, blogging, fun stuff (Facebook) and other stuff like check book balancing, uploading photos, etc... Sometimes the writing portion of my time is reduced to an hour or so. Hubby and I keep saying we are going to get a better schedule for me...giving me more time to write. We need to treat it like more of a job than we are. If I had a job outside of the home...I'd have to leave every day. We need to treat writing like a job. But as always, we have trouble with that....I may leave the room but they all know I'm still in the house. As any good mom out there...it's extremely hard to hear your child scream and not go running towards it.

So anyway...doo luck to everyone out there!!! Can't wait to hear of your progress!!