Confessions Of A Bored Writer
Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Terri Guillemets
I have a confession to make.
I am an artist, not a business focused person. I love to draw, paint, listen to music, design rooms and decorate, cook, write, drink wine (This aids in my creativity!) do needle point and cross stitch, etc. etc. etc. In that long list, which makes this article sound like I’m composing my bio for an online dating site, there’s not one mention of anything that deals with keeping records or balancing checkbooks. If further verification were needed, all I’d have to do is ask my husband about my prowess at balancing said checkbook. Ouch! My ears are still ringing.
Ok. It’s official. I definitely have a stronger bent towards the creative side of life. Since the left side of the brain is the seat of language and processes in a logical and sequential order and the right side is more visual and processes intuitively, holistically, and randomly- my right side is the all out winner.
All that being said, I am not stupid. (Alright, stop laughing Jennifer.) I do recognize that even in the world of writing, authors need to pump up their left side and abdicate the ruling right side every once in a while.
This has been the driving force behind the last few articles I wrote dealing with data from self published authors about the sales of their books. The big conclusions that I found were that you need more than one book out there to generate a source of income, and what marketing works for one author may not work for another.
That last brilliant bit of knowledge took about 9 hours worth of research. I discovered mountains of material out there teaching you tips and techniques, and even more places that promise you for X number of dollars, they will send a release to X number of outlets and so on. It was mind numbing and mostly eye glazing with my head bobbing up and down as I fought the urge to fall into a boredom induced coma.
Even though I was studying an area of writing that intimidated me and didn’t particularly float my boat, I did find a few resources that were terrific. One author that wrote about this business side is J. Steve Miller who put things in an easy to read and understand format. An example he uses in whether to spend many hours a day blogging and building your social media presence is when he describes J. R.R. Tolkien’s life. He was a writer, poet, philosopher, professor and dedicated family man. His day consisted of long hours at the university, coming home to his wife and children whom he spent every evening with, and then writing once the children were in bed. Imagine if he used those precious few hours of working social media rather than writing his wonderful books? There is a strong belief that you should spend approximately 2 hours a day dedicated to social media- Would that work for you?
Mr. Miller also tells us about a young youth minister who wrote a book on teaching special needs children. He was turned down by traditional publishing because he had no platform to work from and they considered him to be a high risk of failure in marketing. He self published, but found he didn’t have time to blog consistently or do other typical things to help the sales of his book. Instead, he had a 1 page blog and spent his limited time emailing radio shows with a link back to his blog that also listed other radio shows he had been on to talk about his subject. As a result, he has been on several large radio shows now and continues to lengthen his credentials on his 1 page blog. This has resulted in increased sales with minimal effort on his part and he’s free to work on other aspects of his life, including writing another book
This type of information, I understand.
I also find it interesting.
