(Photo credit: NancyCz)

As I gear up for releasing the second Street Stories suspense novel Bend Me, Shape Me, I find myself trying to balance my time and energy between writing, promoting and, well, life.  New Libri keeps sending me new drafts to proofread.  My brain keeps thinking of new promotion ideas.  I get focused on contacting reviewers and scheduling interviews.

In short, I get a tad obsessed with making sure I do all I can to call attention to this new book.  So I am counting on my friends to snap me out of it when necessary.  Have I been flooding your Facebook news feed with too many links to my blog?  Did I forget to tell you Happy Birthday?  Are you sick of me sending you emails or talking about writing or asking you to look at cover images?

If so, smack me upside the head–not literally, of course.  Find a way to tell me to stick a sock in it.  While the recent blog post by my publisher talks about the reasons small presses have to rely on their authors to do most of the promotion, that’s not all there is to life.  Help me remember that, will ya please?  Because life is not measured by how well I can market my book, but how many friends I have made along the way.

What some startup presses are now doing is picking books they accept strictly by how well they think the author can market the book. When you submit they ask the author to “prove” they know how to market. Beyond the cliché and rote of “I will do Facebook, create a website, and email all my friends.” There are some advantages of joining this sort of press. The biggest is that as all the authors market away, it raises the stature of the entire press (from a marketing perspective). A thousand authors, where each, for purposes of discussion, add to the other author’s marketing effort by 1% by association. With a thousand authors, your marketing efforts are multiplied by 10. Not bad. You give up good editing and some other things, but still not bad. The press does well too, potentially growing fast and adding a bit of marketing of their own.

via Small Press Dances with Elephants.