Where'd the time go?

An appropriate follow-up to all the marketing I've been talking about is how to keep it in control. I will read a blog, flip through a few others, follow a link here and there and all of a sudden, I glance at the clock and three hours have flown by! Has this happened to you?

I wouldn't mind the time so much, I mean, I am working, I am posting information, marketing my books, getting my name out there — all the stuff I'm supposed to be doing except for one minor thing. I'm not writing. And so far as I can tell from a few days of this, my book hasn't written itself and isn't any further along than it was before I started doing all this marketing.

There seems to be an infinite number of websites out there which talk about books and provide marketing opportunities, but I can't look at them all. I can't participate in all of them — and so many of them want active participation.

How many Goodreads forums are you a part of? How long can you spend reading on Wattpad or Authonomy (where you are not only encouraged to post your work and participate in their forum, but you are also supposed to read and comment intelligently on the work of other authors — it's kind of a tit for tat, you read their work, they read yours)? These can be very helpful websites because you can possibly get really good feedback, or at least, some feedback. On the other hand, who has the time? Or if I take the time, how can I also get my own work done?

Time-management. It seems like such a dirty word, doesn't it? It does to me. But with the marketing, networking and what-not, it's something I now have to start thinking about seriously. So, how do you manage your time? Are you finding the hours slipping away as I am? What do you do about it?

Last week I promised to tell you how many books I sold as a featured author on RG2E. Well, with KDP apparently having some glitch in their reporting system, according to them, I have sold one whole book. Yup. That's it. One. Pretty depressing, huh? I'm putting it down to the fact that it's non-fiction. I can only hope that things improve and that I don't show similarly "fantastic" results when my romance is featured.