The Not-So-Much-Writing Part of Being A Writer

Being in the home stretch toward publication means there’s been a great deal of intense activity in the writing cave, but not much of it feels like writing. This has always been the biggest part of our struggle with the business side. It’s not that rejection hurts too much, which is the received wisdom about writers’ procrastination when it comes to marketing. Rejection isn’t a great sensation, but we’ve never been thin-skinned about it. No, the issue is mostly just the time it takes, that it takes us away from writing.

But if we want to reach an audience, then we must publish the material. Which means we must invest time in the activity of marketing, which is easier to do when we adopt a brighter attitude about it. As part of our reformation, we’re trying to learn as much as possible about how to do it successfully. Because when you don’t know whether to expect your efforts to yield anything, it’s much, much harder to put any real spirit into them. And far easier to rationalize sustaining your familiar routine.

Even with the addition of this post, our Marketing category remains in single digits. That tells us that while we know it’s important (hence, the existence of the category at all) we’ve become very good at ignoring it. And yet, somehow, the books don’t publish themselves. We were so sure that’s how it worked.

Our hope is that, beyond this initial flurry of setup and learning by doing, we’ll be able to keep marketing’s share of our writing time down to a sliver. We really want to focus on our fiction, because that’s what we love. We just need to eke out a little time so it can find more people who will love it, too!