Very thin shoe horn

The world just got more real and insistent. From author with contract for novel to author expected to writing comprehensive marketing plan and sketching out ideas for book trailer in less than a week. Yikes! It's real. I'm officially on the publishing treadmill, and I thought the signings and readings and personal interviews and appearances were tough for the anthologies. Now I have to build a web site, provide content and work on marketing before the book has been copy edited or typeset, and I signed on for this gig. I'm not sure the ink is dry on the contract yet.

This is now the world of the mid list writer: marketing, PR, strategizing and selling. I need someone to be me for that part of things so I can stay home and keep writing, otherwise I'll be lucky if I can find a shoe horn thin enough to fit a little life into my life. John said that outsourcing my public persona is identity theft and there are some aspects of my identity he'd like to keep to himself. I told him to give me a list and I wouldn't outsource them. I sure hope this gets easier as I break readership statistics down from characters and venues in the book and begin making plans to make the rounds at writers conferences. I keep reminding myself this is what I signed on for, except that it's really not. I signed on to write books and sign the occasional autograph while someone else sells the books and does the PR.

Okay, time to buck up and stop whining since I'm out of cheese. The publishing world has changed and it's up to me to sell the books I write just like Mark Twain, except that Twain actually hired salesmen to take his books out across the country and sell them door to door. Great! I've just become the Fuller Brush Company.

That is all. Disperse.