I’ve noticed something lately. I, like many people, I suspect, have a limited amount of time every day to spend on writing-related activities. These activities include:
- Plotting/planning
- Research
- Writing
- Editing
- Marketing
- Publishing activities
- Ancillary activities, like blogging or market research
I would like to break these down a bit, so, say, I always have half an hour to an hour for actual writing, and maybe another half an hour for marketing/publishing activities, but that doesn’t seem to be the way things are working out at the moment.
So everything is currently coming out of the same well of time. And with the current climate of publishing, where authors are increasingly in charge of their own marketing, it behooves people to be aware of marketing techniques and to keep up with new and changing marketing trends.
And I realized lately that I seem to be denoting the majority of my writing time pool to marketing. But not, like, actual marketing. Learning about marketing. Taking marketing classes, readings marketing blogs, going to marketing webinars. Most are writing-related, but some are just general marketing.
Am I procrastinating? Is it an excuse to not do any real marketing, because I’m still “learning”? (Though, at this point, everything’s starting to sound the same and I’m pretty sure I’m not getting anything new out of anything.) Is it something that makes it seem like I’m being productive when I’m really not?
I hope to be able to better utilize my time now that I’ve realized what I’ve been doing. But I thought I’d bring it up in case other people are unknowingly (or in denial about) doing the same thing. Learning is well and good, but if you’re not getting anything done, it’s time to re-evaluate.
Have you ever realized you were trapped in the illusion of productivity? And to stick with marketing, what is the most useful thing you’ve found works?
(In other good news, my Kit Campbell Books and Kit the Editor websites are back up. They did lose some of the more recent content, so I will need to get them back up to date, but if you need general info, it’s all there, so go and take a look!)
