From what I can see, young adult writers tend to be extremely canny and energetic self-promoters–much more so than SF writers. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes: so much activity on the web and on social media and in terms of library visits and conferences and blog tours and book tours and all the other things. The amount of stuff that people do is pretty overwhelming. And many of these authors are people with children! I have no children and I don’t have a full-time job, so it feels like there’s no excuse for not doing everything under the sun.

And I know someone is going to chime in and say, “Oh, don’t drive yourself crazy. Just do what you’re comfortable with!”

But, umm, you don’t get points for doing less. Like, yeah, sure, writing the books is the most important thing. And there’s no percentage in putting so much time into self-promotion that you damage your health, productivity, and sanity.

But I also don’t want to be sitting around in three years and regretting all the time that I wasted because I was too lazy to wade in and endure some momentary discomfort and figure things out. Also, I’m comfortable with alot of self-promotion. I have no problem talking to strangers and generally foisting myself upon other people. The barrier here isn’t social anxiety; it’s just laziness. I keep thinking, well, whatever, I’ll sort it out soon enough.

I guess it could be worse. I do have this blog. And I’ve got a reasonable-enough presence on Twitter and Facebook. But those things are no help as to how to proceed, because I’ve been working on the blog for five years, and on my Twitter and Facebook presence for two years, and none of the three are particularly huge. And in each case it was very organic. I got blog readers one by one. I got Twitter followers one by one. And I suppose there’s some worth to that.

But I’m not sure how to move things along to the next stage, where I’m appealing reading crowds (even small crowds) of people.

Well, I’ll sort it out soon enough.