Over the past few days, I realized why doing publicity for my book has been especially taxing.
While I was writing the book itself, I often skipped around between essays, poems, etc. If I got stuck writing the end of one essay, I could jump to one in a completely different part of the book and work on that. Or just take a break and come back to it later when I might have fresh ideas.
But publicity is a different animal altogether! It's linear, with deadlines, and research that sometimes turns out to be a dead end (such as the bookstore that turned me down for a reading after I spent considerable time, just trying to find the right person to talk to about booking events).
I have to write text for brochures and print them, all in time to take with me to a show. No skipping around - everything has to be prioritized, to make sure I don't work on something for an event that's well off into the future (but I happen to be inspired to prepare for it) and end up forgetting to do something for a more immediate event until it's too late! After the deadline has passed, it's hard to keep myself from engaging in some serious self blame! At least regret, anyway.
All this has left me exhausted.The only antidote is to stop for a bit, take some notes, prepare some lists of things to do in a timely manner, and then rest up (if there's time for that!) before diving back in.
I always knew marketing would take almost as much work as writing, but I didn't anticipate how the nature of the work would make it even harder for me. Perhaps I'm just a touch ADD? Hmmm... Now why would you ever say that?
While I was writing the book itself, I often skipped around between essays, poems, etc. If I got stuck writing the end of one essay, I could jump to one in a completely different part of the book and work on that. Or just take a break and come back to it later when I might have fresh ideas.
But publicity is a different animal altogether! It's linear, with deadlines, and research that sometimes turns out to be a dead end (such as the bookstore that turned me down for a reading after I spent considerable time, just trying to find the right person to talk to about booking events).
I have to write text for brochures and print them, all in time to take with me to a show. No skipping around - everything has to be prioritized, to make sure I don't work on something for an event that's well off into the future (but I happen to be inspired to prepare for it) and end up forgetting to do something for a more immediate event until it's too late! After the deadline has passed, it's hard to keep myself from engaging in some serious self blame! At least regret, anyway.
All this has left me exhausted.The only antidote is to stop for a bit, take some notes, prepare some lists of things to do in a timely manner, and then rest up (if there's time for that!) before diving back in.
I always knew marketing would take almost as much work as writing, but I didn't anticipate how the nature of the work would make it even harder for me. Perhaps I'm just a touch ADD? Hmmm... Now why would you ever say that?
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