Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

Being a writer isn’t only about the writing of books and stories. There is this thing called “PROMOTION” which has to be done.  Except it’s not promotion per se, it is letting people know you exist and then maybe that you write as well. Sometimes that is fun and sometimes it’s hard work. Sometimes you don’t even know if it’s doing you any good.

I love Twitter! Thank God for that. It makes my promotion life easier, but I just like hanging and keeping up to date. I’m probably a wee bit, just a teeny eensy bit over stimulated, particularly for my age group. My grown up kids don’t use Twitter like I do and definitely don’t get it.

Facebook is cool too because it’s so useful to keep in touch with people and extended family and it has some fab tools, like pages. Of course, playing around on Facebook is time consuming too. I’m probably lucky that I can justify the time spent on their as promotion, when is just another form of procrastination.

Blog posts (like this one) take time to write. Not only do I need to maintain this blog, but I should do guest blogs and interviews to get my name out there. This are great but boy can they be hard work. Interviews are pretty easy really except where there are hard questions. The hard part of these is not letting on you’re an idiot. Okay, okay.  I mean sounding like an idiot. Also, you want to let some of your personality through, preferably not all of it. Not the I had ‘one margarita too many’ personality that only your dearest friends have seen and have refrained from putting the footage of such incidents on Youtube. Then there are topic based blog posts for other people’s blogs. I think I spend as much time staring at the screen thinking up what I will talk about as I do writing the post.

Then we come to what do I write on my blog to keep it active, so people know I’m alive and also I’m not writing posts that say ‘buy my book, buy  it now’ every day. To help with that I do interviews on various topics. Usually these are related to the craft of writing and it gives other authors an opportunity to promote their work as well as sharing their writing titbits. I suppose some smart and hyper-intelligent person is thinking, why are they doing this? In the good ol’ days writers didn’t do this. They just wrote.

I’m sure many a writer has thought the same and doesn’t bother. Unfortunately, these aren’t the good ol’ days anymore (that’s why the are called the good ol’ days). We are a very connected society. There’s the Internet and there’s Internet shopping. There is also fewer physical bookstores to put books in for people to buy by walking past it on the shelf. That does go on still, but not in a big way.

Then there’s ebooks! They aren’t on physical book shelves. They are on the Internet so the Internet is where you need to market those. Discoverability is the new challenge. It’s always been a challenge I believe, it’s just harder these days. There are a lot of writers out there. Writers are in competition with games, dvds, social media and other forms of entertainment.

Speaking of YouTube, I have not got very far with that. There could be live blogs, interviews, panel discussions, book trailers, pictures of me sunbathing and other things that I can’t think of right now. Working full time with my day job leaves me with plenty of imagination but little time to invest in putting ideas into action.

Now we come to the point of this blog post. You have probably been wondering that.

Doing this for two is a killer. I have two of me!

There’s me and there’s the other me. That’s two lots of blogs, Twitter, Facebook and guest blogging to maintain. It’s like having your brain ripped out through your nose. Okay that’s mummification! But you know it’s painful. I have to think stuff up twice! TWICE!

I shouldn’t complain. I mean I decided to have two of me, writing completely different stuff so I should have to wear it.

Why am I telling you this? If you think I’m not doing a good job keeping my blogs up to date, then this is my letter to the teacher.

PS I tell a lie. Rayessa and the Space Pirates also has a social media presence. That’s three.

The non-official photo of me

Photo by Taamati Terata