Thoughts on the life-balance of writing and selling/promoting

80/20

Photo by Julia Kicova on Unsplash

So after several weeks of working over this piece, this morning I re-envisioned it, tossed what I had, and started over.

My reasoning? The piece was trying to answer all possible questions for all readers. It was losing points and shape. Once I begin to struggle with ‘big structure’ in something that is not supposed to be a novel (!), I know it’s gone beyond.

I realized that, above all, I want this piece to be useful to the people who polled as putting in too much time promoting, when what they really want to be doing is mostly writing. That’s certainly where the first poll stood, and the second indicated that more than a quarter of you would love to simply write FT.

Which might mean that those writers—28% of those who responded—don’t need to earn something of a living. Or it might mean that many of you would dearly love to “just write!”

Among the comments from a number of you, there were wise words about how “promoting” is really just keeping your words/work in readers minds (yes), and how in the immediate weeks and months of a book’s birth, a lot of time is—and must be—spent doing promotional pieces (yes, again). One pointed out that “selling” can lead to other opportunities. I would add that some of those opps can be about writing, and others are further opps to sell. But with enough opps, one might be able to pick and choose… More on that later.

Altogether, a lot of reality and truths.

And some of these thoughts/realities I’ve posted about before, so I’ll share some of those archives with you to revisit. Links will be at the close of the piece.

Mostly, I’m going to do some thinking about the reality of working toward an 80/20 (writing & promoting/selling) balance. And I’ll share a brief story about my own experience in the past few weeks that might reveal my motivation in writing this, and my writing—or I’ll say “promoting”—life.