Reading about self promotion and marketing, and I stare at these articles in horrified astonishment and curse not always so silently: holy crap! “Blog at least several times a week……tweet twenty times a day……retweet your messages and blog links at least five times a day for nine months, at varying times of day to catch anyone who may have missed the last several hundred….”
It’s like reading pregnancy books and compiling the doctor’s advice about eating properly, eating healthy and balanced, and how much and of which food types you must ingest at each meal. Put together, you’d spend your entire day eating and drinking. I’d exclaim, ‘Holy Crap! How many do you think are in there!?’ I’m pregnant (was), I didn’t transform into a garbage disposal.
The same for this new endeavor. Holy crap! How much time do you think exists in a day? Compiled together, the majority of your day and night is tweeting, followed by blogging, Facebook, Google+, tumblr, instagram, and pinterest. Forget about work, family, children, sleep, and eating and any other likes and interests you may think you have. Writing? Oh that’s funny. Tweet, I tell you! Tweet!
It’s enough to make a new self publisher run screaming for traditional rejection. I don’t think any of us ever questioned that marketing and publicity were full time jobs- for marketing and publicity specialists. I guess my gripe is the illogic of some of these advice articles, and how it almost borders on making yourself obnoxious and telemarketer-like.
Unless I’m completely out of the loop- does anyone truly spend that much time on social media plugging their books and pushing their blog posts?
I’ve decided to treat recommended times as generalizations. I don’t have that many hours in a day, and I’m pretty sure my current paying job would frown on me using their time to do so, and I can’t feel pressured or guilt-ridden about something I simply can’t do. My children like to see me every night- standing, and separated from the computer. And, even though I’m not pregnant, I need to eat! And sleep, and engage in other sanity-saving interests.
Can only do what we can.
Until we strike it big, and can afford to hire ourselves a social media assistant 🙂
Of Words and Writing 
You’re absolutely right-that kind of methodology is aggressive & likely unnecessary. Go forth with your own unique plan!
Thanks! It’s a very narrow, linear way of thinking. Sure, tweeting that often and blogging every day WILL ensure more people may see your content, but that doesn’t ensure that they’ll like it, that they’ll care, will act proactively toward it, or even that it’s a quality contribution.
Yeah, unfortunately there are lots of people who do do that. They clutter up the twitter feeds and inboxes with messages every 15 minutes. Tools have made it easy to automate this stuff, sending messages that promote random blogs from their archive. I think these tools should be used sparingly. It’s important to give people access to your content yes, but you don’t have to ‘advertise’ it all the time. Good content promoted to the right people at the right time is better than just screaming out everything you have constantly. They simply will stop listening.
I agree. I can’t think of one book I read because of an advertisement. I’ve had this serendipitous view of marketing: like you said, the right people will see our content at the right time. Going fanatic about it seems counterintuitive and self-sabotaging. You piss people off and make them sick of you, they are not only going to avoid anything you produce, they’ll make sure everyone they know does the same.