It's been a month since I posted last. That's a no no in marketing life. It seems the secret to self-promotion is consistency and frequency. Unfortunately I have a firm deadline of when class starts this fall, so have been going a bit crazy to get the novel, which my professors see as peripheral, a side-gig that should take a back seat to their assigned work if I want to be serious in the career path, and mayhaps they're right. But I can't just do one thing. Like most of the writers I've met, for me it's somewhat cathartic, something of an obsession, and something they can't stop doing. Being successful in anything often requires single-minded focus bordering on obsession. My problem is having more than one passion. I mean many people don't even have one, and I have at least two, three if you split the music into performing and studying history.
Yeah. So, I have a definite deadline. And I already didn't get as much done this summer as I wanted to, spending more time working on the novel than I'd originally scheduled. My therapist says it's because I took on too much. He can see where he kind of has point. I mean, as is I suppose I pulled off a small miracle between learning Italian, studying 20th century classical music history, gathering research on a 40 page academic research paper I meant to write, and revising and polishing a novel that in manuscript format is 347 pages, about 92K words. Isn't that enough? No. But I can't put out a piece of work that is mediocre. It has to be the very best it can be. I even managed to have a little fun along the way this summer, going on a few dates, meeting new friends, and going away for a weekend in Chicago for Market Days.
So...at what point do I have the mental energy to blog?
Authors are having to do a lot of their own promotion these days, I see even major names doing a fair amount of it on social media. The nature of that promoting changes when you become huge, like Jim Butcher or Neil Gaiman. They promote their novels via interviews and guest posts on blogs. They have people at their major label publishing companies to do the tweeting and posting on social media or crafting attractive ads and getting people to review their work. These people seem to be the exception, however, not the rule. For me, I have to maintain a regular presence on Goodreads, which, by the way, has a giveaway for my short story collection Three By Moonlight during the rest of the month of August. I'm also on Twitter (@jnelsonaviance), and on le Facebook.
For the last week or so, however, I've been going through the manuscript and first entering the corrections my editor suggestion with the ever-subtle red pen, then, and this is something I've only been doing more recently, reading the text out loud. This helped a lot in catching things I had otherwise overlooked. It especially helped realize where I had used words too often In too short a time. Power, for instance, comes to mind as it is necessary in a number of different contexts. And there were a few pages where every character reacted by jerking their head in the direction of a new speaker, or seemed to nod like a bunch of bobble heads.
This takes time, though. On average, and this is the same when I'm reading an academic paper during a presentation, I take about two and a half minutes to read a double-spaced page. The editing process means that with my manuscript I probably only managed three or four minutes per page. Needless to say I finished last night close to four, so am running on about five hours sleep right now.
I'm hoping that I'll find a greater balance, since even the editing process often doesn't feel that creative, which is a lot of the fun and catharsis of writing stories in the first place. But even that is more creative than trying to strategize about effective uses of Twitter, or tracking sales, or hunting down places to submit for reviews. Those things have their own appeal, but they aren't the free flow of ideas that makes my left-brain sizzle.
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