Promotion Blues

Promotion is often a dirty word for writers and I am one of those who has to admit that I constantly shirk my promotion duties. We don't like to advertise ourselves or our books, and somehow we hope readers find them anyway.

This week I a putting together a promotional giveaway for the Colorado Romance Writers annual Readers' Tea and that sort of promotion I love to do because I get to buy lots of fun little items to go in the gift bag - chocolate, wine, pens, pencils, books and other goodies.  Last year my sister and sister-in-law spent hours making plastic canvas bookmarks. They came out great, but then I realized the thickness of the plastic made it hard to actually use the marks in books. Ooops. No more of those.

Promotion has always been a problem for me, even when I was producing daily newscasts. In addition to putting together the newscast, producers often have to write those clever little teases that the anchors must read just before they go to commercial.  You know, the ones that end with, "stay tuned," or begin with, "coming up next." Some of our producers would start thinking of how they were going to tease a story from the moment they first knew it was going to be in the newscast. I was never very good at that and as a result I waited until the last minute to write those teases. Mine went something like, "Weather is next, will it rain tomorrow?" And then the little tag line under the visual would read something like  "Sunny Saturday?"

You get the picture.  Well, now I find that I have to promote or tease MYSELF as a writer. I need to promote my books. Luckily I don't have to come up with lots of daily clever little blurbs, but I do need to have a Facebook page, a web page, a Pinterest page, a blog, and so many other things I can't even count them all.  I'm not good at it, but I am trying.  And with Facebook, I not only should have a personal page, but a reader fan page I'm told. Oh, and that doesn't include having a Twitter account. So much promotion, so little time to write.

This week I finally spent some time trying to update my webpages and Facebook pages. And I find I enjoy Pinterest. I have more fun seeing what others are doing and how they organize their pages. And I found myself coming up with new ways to use some of the wonderful pictures I've run across or re-pinning from other people.

So here's a toast to today's promotion -- and the links to my various sites, just to show that I can do some promotion, even if it is very simple and done at the last minute... just like old times in the newsroom.

And I'm hearing we'll be having a sunny Saturday. I'll toast that too! The last weekend of September.

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