Fuck me, I need a drink. And a minion. Maybe a host of minions (is that the collective noun? No idea but I’m going to go with it.) If I had a host of minions, there’d be one just to get me a drink and another look up the collective nouns for things. The rest would be hard at work, doing all the shit that I either don’t have time for or the necessary fucks to give one away willy-nilly. I might even dedicate one to swearing for me, as it’s unladylike and my mother always thought it important that I be a lady, not that I think that’s been overly successful.
I like writing. I enjoy it and it gives me a great deal of satisfaction. What I am quickly coming to not enjoy so much is the other stuff that you have to do. I’m sure it’s been raised by other people, but if you’re responding to facebook and twitter constantly, when exactly are you supposed to write? What about joining groups? Start up a conversation, with witting sayings inserted in appropriate places, until everyone is madly in love with your writing style and will instantly download your book. Excellent strategy, except everyone else is doing that too and once everyone does it, the forums quickly becoming extraordinarily boring with everyone trying to market to each other. There really is nothing more desperate that writers trying to get other writers to buy their stuff.
Host an event! Invite people to attend and they will invite their friends and soon you’ll be famous! Another excellent strategy except I have no idea how to do that. The only parties I’ve held successfully have involved darkened rooms and lots of alcohol. How can I be witty and exciting when, being on the other side of the world, it’s the early hours of the morning and I can’t see anyone’s face? Hmmm… actually maybe that does have some possibilities. If no one knows what I look like, I can be Batman!
Rant over, I do need to knuckle down and listen to my lovely PR person, who is only trying to help. The market is saturated at the moment, so I’m given to understand, and it’s hard to stand out. And dressing like Batman really won’t be enough. Damn it!
L. C. Fenton Author 
(Sorry, this might be a double but something looked strange before so I’ll give it another go):
I hear ya! And if you ask me, there wasn’t nearly enough swearing for this dilemna. Nothing is a sure-fire win when it comes to book promotions, and writing that next book is just as — nay, MORE important than Tweeting & posting & blah blah blahing about the current book, so keep your writing as the top priority, and as for the rest of it, just do what’s fun, easy & fits in your schedule. I’ve watched many authors (myself included) exhaust themselves trying every social-networking trick only to end up w/ the same kind of sales they’d have had if they did nothing. We’ve got to make some effort to get ourselves out there, but at some point a book will either start selling itself or it won’t. Meanwhile, who knows which future book might take off and draw attention to all of our other books? But first we’ve got to write them, yeah?
Absolutely! It seems as if once you have 4-5 books out there, you get a certain momentum and it becomes easier. I’ve about finished no. 3 so I’ve still got a couple to go before I reach that point. It takes me a least a year though to finish anything. I don’t know how people do in every 3 months or so. I can’t get my head around that level of productivity! I might need to hold classes teaching people the Joys of Slacking Off & Advanced Procrastination.