Learning to Manage Online

This weekend I attended a very informative talk by Talli Roland at SE Chapter of the Romantic Novelist’s Association. She talked about marketing our books online, and suggested several ways we could reach out to our readers. A lot of the things she mentioned I already knew (in general), since I’m on several online social networks and have had this blog for a while, but I learned a lot anyway. I came away scratching my head (not because I have lice, I assure you). According to Talli, she spends about ten minutes on social networks for every two hours that she writes. Now that’s discipline! Once I get into facebook and twitter I tend to forget myself and scroll through all the messages and read up on what my friends have been doing, and before I know it an hour has passed and I haven’t gotten any writing done. Consequently, I stay away from the media because I don’t seem to be able to reconcile the two.

Consequently, the key two things I learned from Talli’s talk are not necessarily what she may have wanted me to learn. Here they are, though:

1. Manage your time very strictly, and make sure most of your time is going into writing, but be consistent about reaching out.  This means timing yourself and using social media as a break rather than a focus. So, here I am, back on my blog again, but I’m going to make my blogs shorter.

2. Keeping up with everything is hard work, and there are no shortcuts, but overdoing things isn’t the way to go about it. I realize that I really do spend a lot of time on doing research for blogs, etc. which perhaps isn’t time well spent. All research should be relevant to what I’m writing and shouldn’t be research to put on a blog, even though I love doing the research.

Not sure how this will work, but perhaps you can let me know how I’m doing as we go along

 

Talli with fellow Austen spin-off author Juliet Archer