Last March I started a blog because my local branch of the Society of Authors suggested no serious writer could exist without a blog. Unfortunately I didn't really understand what I was meant to be doing there - i.e. marketing my writing. I managed to write the whole thing for about 10 months without once mentioning my published work Blarney Castle: its history meaning and function so clearly it was a failure.
The blog turned into a diary of sorts, with occasional forays into opinion columns. It was not a good place to market my work! Although it did contain some very impassioned bits of writing, it contained TMI about my emotional/marital crises, and therefore the antithesis of a good marketing exercise (which I understand to require a sunny spin on everything).
So this blog is going to be a hard-edged marketing tool (collapses into giggles) to force people to take my work seriously. I do actually take my writing seriously, it is almost the only thing I take really seriously and can even have sense of humour failures about.
The problem is for years I haven't given it the time and energy and there has been too much else going on, and now I am taking it really seriously, and am going to finish another book this year, and research some non-fiction. Everything else I have been doing can take care of itself, or whither away like the state .... I am going to have to do something I dislike this year, that is, to let people down. I started various enterprises to make some money - I made about £450 from marketing/PR £200 from catering and about £1700 from "hospitality", I can fit in hospitality with writing - since I have to do some housework and cook, but I cannot fit other stuff in - because the amount of time I spent trying to earn those marketing millions was way out of proportion. And I was hating it, and beginning to feel quite angry with my "business partner". So, banish these activities, get some foreign students into the house and write like the wind....
The blog turned into a diary of sorts, with occasional forays into opinion columns. It was not a good place to market my work! Although it did contain some very impassioned bits of writing, it contained TMI about my emotional/marital crises, and therefore the antithesis of a good marketing exercise (which I understand to require a sunny spin on everything).
So this blog is going to be a hard-edged marketing tool (collapses into giggles) to force people to take my work seriously. I do actually take my writing seriously, it is almost the only thing I take really seriously and can even have sense of humour failures about.
The problem is for years I haven't given it the time and energy and there has been too much else going on, and now I am taking it really seriously, and am going to finish another book this year, and research some non-fiction. Everything else I have been doing can take care of itself, or whither away like the state .... I am going to have to do something I dislike this year, that is, to let people down. I started various enterprises to make some money - I made about £450 from marketing/PR £200 from catering and about £1700 from "hospitality", I can fit in hospitality with writing - since I have to do some housework and cook, but I cannot fit other stuff in - because the amount of time I spent trying to earn those marketing millions was way out of proportion. And I was hating it, and beginning to feel quite angry with my "business partner". So, banish these activities, get some foreign students into the house and write like the wind....
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