Overwhelmed!

These days everyone in the book biz is exhorting authors to join every social network they can, participate in the community, and blog, blog, blog. I joined Facebook two years ago and now have close to 4,400 Friends. That includes people I personally know or have met, professional colleagues I know more at a distance, people with whom I’ve established online acquaintances, and total strangers who share mutual friends. I no longer actively solicit Friends because I’m swiftly bumping up against the 5,000 limit and setting out to develop my “Fan Page” at Lisa Mason, the Fantasy and Science Fiction Author.

So by all means, send me a Friend Request and message me that you read it on this Blog and certainly “Like” my Fan Page (which is still primitive; I hope to work on it this week). I’ll reciprocate if you’ve got a Fan Page.

But I must tell you, between my slow Internet connection and lame browser, the simplest thing can take me hours. I post my ebook promotions on ten different groups set up for that purpose almost daily. And there’s always something, someone to reply to, discussions to foster, and so on. Thank God WordPress has set up an automatic link to my Facebook Profile Page so this blog posts there. I’m especially grateful for the auto-link because some days—horrors!—I don’t have time to go on Facebook at all!

I’m overwhelmed by Facebook alone.

And Facebook isn’t all there is.

I recently joined LinkedIn, which isn’t quite so hectic and Connecting is much more conservative, but I also belong to a number of writers’ groups and there are always discussions to join or initiate, subsequent comments to respond to, and promotions to post.

Overwhelmed again.

I’ve just started building up Followers on Twitter. When I first signed up, the system had a monstrous bug called “The Blank Page.” I literally couldn’t get into the system or to my profile page for maybe eight months. Now good old WordPress is posting auto-links from this blog to Twitter. In a few days, I’ve gone from 20 Followers to 375 or more, and climbing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great people over there, learned of authors and their books I didn’t know about before, and connected with some long-time readers and fans. It’s great. Proper etiquette insists that you thank someone who follows you, so there is always follow-through. I’m @lisaSmason, by the way. Some days I wake to 500 emails in my mailbox.

Way overwhelmed.

I’m just getting started on Goodreads as a Goodreads Author, signed up for Gather and LibraryThing, let Formspring go (can’t get it to work on my browser, don’t have time to load Firefox), scouted out Tumblr and all the other nets WordPress auto-links to.

Way, way overwhelmed.

I’ve read about authors who’ve spent 12–14 hours a day DOING NOTHING BUT PROMOTION AND SOCIAL NETWORKING. Some of their books became successful. Some didn’t.

What that means, though, is they’re not getting real work done. They’re not writing. Dare I say it? Producing more work is more essential to an author’s career than social networking.

There. I said it.

I’m preparing four ebooks of the Lily Modjeska Mysteries, books I wrote ten years ago, just reposted my new urban fantasy, The Garden of Abracadabra, as three books (or you can acquire the huge three-books-in-one-volume edition), and preparing The Quester Trilogy (three ebooks adapting Arachne and Cyberweb, cyberpunks I published with William Morrow). I’ve written a brand-new book and I’m developing a brand-new series.

Did I mention I’m overwhelmed?

Let me ask you this: how do you cope?

Do you stick with just one social network? If you belong to more than one, do you assign a day of the week when you focus on that? Or do you try to juggle everything day by day? Or do you have an assistant who handles the overflow (you lucky devil)?

I will much appreciate your comments because I’m overwhelmed!

Visit me sometime at http://www.lisamason.com.