Setting Priorities

One of the problems about being a self-published author is that you have to do everything yourself, dozens of different jobs, and doing them all successful requires that you review them all and pick your priorities.

Now I’m the sort of person who likes to sit alone in an office and work on a computer all day. It’s why I became a writer. Hence I’m very happy to convince myself that the thing I need to do is to record the next podcast. My security instinct tells me to always be one episode ahead and not to leave things to the last minute. And until today I had been one episode ahead, but last week I merged two short episodes into one, which means that now I don’t have a spare. So what I want to do is to spend today recording the next episode. I’m getting faster at this but it still takes about a day.

But now the marketing director side of me steps forward and says ‘Oh no! You need to be promoting this brand new exciting product and getting it out there. So far you’ve got about 100 listeners registered with Podiobooks, but you need more, much more! Get out there and start promoting.’

Both Evo Terra of Podiobooks and Rhonda Carpenter of PodioRacket have given me some advice about how to spread the word, and that’s what I need to do. Also Rhonda tells me I need to set up a competition. I’ve got three ideas for this, and I can use each of them as a news item over the next few days and weeks. I also feel I should be issuing press releases, although maybe social networking is more important these days.

Anyway I close down my copy of Audacity and start promoting. I’m still sitting at the computer, so things are not that different, but self-promotion does not come easy for me. I’m gonna have to learn!