Too Much Time Marketing?

Good Morning Everyone! It’s the dilemma that every self-published author struggles with: how much time you spend marketing your books compared to how much time you spend on writing? I know that I struggle with this very often. I’m back into marketing heavily for my book Laurel Hill: New Beginnings Book 1. I’ve been planning what to write and outlining future books, but for the past month since I got back into the groove I realized I haven’t actually written anything! I had this happen early on after publishing my book. I found I was spending all of my time marketing and not working on anything new. It’s so easy to fall back into being busy doing everything for your books EXCEPT writing them. But the main focus of being an author should always be writing.

One trick I used in the past to get back to making time to write was designating a specific day to write and then a different day to market. For me, my creative juices seem to flow much better when I first wake up. So I chose Saturday mornings for my writing time. If I spend a few hours writing early in the morning, it still leaves me the rest of the afternoon and evening to get chores and running done. Now for marketing, it’s a little trickier. Anyone trying to promote their small business knows that you can’t just work on marketing one day a week. You have to keep your social media up on a daily basis.

But there are so many other aspects to marketing your books: scheduling giveaways, researching new apps to help manage social media accounts, making connections with other authors or marketers, setting up paid ads through the various social media sites, finding people to review your book, following other blogs that are part of your business niche…it never seems to end. For all of the marketing that I need to do, I chose Sunday afternoons to work on this. I am still able to go to church in the morning and then work on the computer doing marketing for several hours.

I know that some of you probably use other tips to keep you on track, and I’d love to hear some of your time management tricks.  I hope this has helped someone struggling with managing their writing time.