Yeah, I know. I’m a slacker. If I don’t have constant pushing or motivation, I tend to drift away from the stuff I need to do in favor of stuff I want to do.
Take the book marketing/promotion, for example: I’ve seriously let that slide in the past couple of weeks, and from what my publisher tells me it’s shown in my sales. I’m really frustrated with myself for that, because I want the book to do well. I just am not good at pushing myself.
I’m hoping to take my promotion back on the road in the next few days to get more people interested in/hearing about Abnormal. I need to set goals and meet them, though, if I’m going to be successful at this. I can’t just keep tweeting excerpts from the sequel-in-progress or what have you. I have to remind myself that publishing and marketing a book takes hard work, and I have to treat it like the job it is. Set times each day for researching and contacting influencers, set a number of influencers per day to contact, etc.
Tucson Comic Con should help sales pick up a bit, but I have to promote that appearance, too. Gotta get word out that I’ll be there, and I have to think up something other than just books to have at my table. I’ve got some ideas (one excellent one in particular thanks to my Editor in Chief), but it’s going to take some–you guessed it–work to get them done.
Too bad “author” isn’t a job where you can clock in for your hours worked and rake in the dough that way. That would be awesome.
Of course, if it was like that, G.R.R. Martin wins the game. Straight up trolling his fans by letting the TV show surpass the books in story and just, as far as anyone can tell, not finishing the series. Not cool, man, not cool.