Analysing our promotion efforts

How to decide which things are worth our time (including a review of my recent book treasure hunt)

One of the big, hard questions authors face when promoting our work is how much time to spend on our own personal promotional efforts. If we do too much, it feels like a huge distraction from writing (and it can be exhausting to feel like we’re constantly promoting ourselves!). If we do too little, and our book doesn’t reach many readers, it can lead to worry and self-doubt over whether we should have done more, and what else we ‘should’ do (which tends to be a bottomless pit of anxiety).

My thinking is this: Unless we already have some kind of celebrity status, any promotional efforts we do are going to be simply an effort to turn the smallest cogs in the very large and complex publishing machine. If you can get those humble cogs to move, then their impact may well begin to spread. However, the largest cogs are usually only moved by the power of your publisher. And they are moved by a few key things: