Social Network Marketing 101 - Part 3 of 3: Balancing Your Private and Public Writing Life
Posted By Marie-Claude Bourque on May 31, 2010
Marie-Claude Bourque, American Title V Winner
By Marie-Claude Bourque
1st Turning Point Guest Instructor
Copyright © 2010 Marie-Claude Bourque
Every minute you spend online could be spent working on your best promotional tool: your book. But you also need to be online for promotion and networking as previously discussed, and sometimes you just need a break and want to have fun online. But you could also be online to avoid writing. You need to know why you are there.
Why are you online?
You may not be aware that being online is actually draining, while writing may nourish you. We write because it fills a need in us and usually we feel better after we write. When online, blogging or interacting socially, we send energy outwards, towards others. If you spend too much of your precious energy on being social, you may not have enough left to write. You may have squandered your creativity of the day on a witty Tweet or interesting blog. So you need balance.
Know what you are doing and why.
Realize that you have two sides in your writing life: your private writing life, done quietly alone writing your book; and your public writing life, done out there promoting your book and networking with writing people.
Being online has many costs and not all are obvious. Besides the time suck (and we know how easy time flies when we are online), there can be a creativity cost, a risk of fragmentation in your work, and an emotional cost.
When you start blogging and Tweeting, your brain is suddenly filled with creative blog posts and smart Tweets, where before it was filled with your characters talking to you. And so most of your creativity is spent on your promotion with little space left for your actual writing. If you keep checking your email and Twitter when you are working, there is a cost in fragmenting your thought process, and you don’t give your brain the time to really soak into your writing to get to that “heart-wrenching, bleeding on the page” kind of writing. Some people work well in short bursts, but most of us don’t. And then there is the emotional cost. As writers, we tend to express a lot of feeling in writing. There is a chance of revealing too much of ourselves online and then opening ourselves up for criticisms and nasty comments. It doesn’t happen too much, but we sometimes may wonder if we said too much and then worry afterwards. Interact with a whole lot of people on a daily basis and you may set yourself up for some emotional drama. It is hard to keep our cool all the time. It is actually pretty tough to be constantly in the public eye.
You need to balance your public and private writing life.
Here are some ideas:
- Try to know ahead of time how much time you need to spend on both.
- Block large chunks of time for each part to be able to better focus your brain.
- Do each one on different tools (computer, notepads, paper notebook, phone…).
- Do your writing with no internet access available.
- Do each in a different physical area (office, bedroom, library, or coffee shop).
- Do the most important one first (M-C’s personal note: now I always write first thing in the morning with pen and paper. During American Title V, what mattered was getting the contract, and I did no writing at all.)
- Try to make yourself more efficient in your online world by optimizing chores (prep more than one blog at once, send birthday messages during the bus ride, etc.)
- Know your brain cycle—when are you best at writing, when are you more rational, when are you so very tired and feel like a Facebook game is just about the only thing you can do?
Protect yourself and, as some say, protect the work. I took this whole online promotion thing to an extreme level during the American Title (12 hrs a day+) and I was so burned out at the end that I collapsed, disappeared and wrote nothing but a short story for almost 6 months. I was very drained and needed that time to nourish myself again by reading novels and writing my journal. All AT contestants went through that, so I was warned ahead of time. ATV lasted 6 months. It is impossible (unless you have an assistant) to maintain that level for an entire career, so pace yourself.
I recommend a great book on the subject called BookLife by Jeff Vandermeer.
From my own perspective, I find Vandermeer (a sci-fi author) to be the one author who writes about online marketing and really gets it—both the strategies and the costs of promotion.
Make sure that you are aware of your two writing lives and plan for both. Evaluate at the end of the day or week to make sure you spent your time appropriately and that your public writing life is not taking over your private writing life.
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To read Part 1, click: Social Network Marketing 101 - Part 1 of 3: There Are No Recipes
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To read Part 2, click: Social Network Marketing 101 - Part 2 of 3: Synergy—The Art of Creating a Buzz
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There’s so much to learn and electronic media changes every day, as does the publishing world. That’s where my biggest drain is. Trying to learn. I have, however, come to the decision that I can only do so much and all the promotion and name recognition-building stuff won’t matter a hill of beans if I stop writing. I try not to stress about missing book blogging opportunities or tours and a million other web-based activities. I have a family life that needs attention too. I feel pulled in so many directions so I try to make what I do to promote count.
Margie Chruch is so right. There is so much to learn. And thanks to Marie-Claude it has been made easier. Excellent article, Marie-Claude. I find the points you have made to be most accurate and agree wholeheartedly with the idea of not allowing the internet to fragment one’s writing. Hopefully, you will add further of your insights and share them with the rest of us.
Thank you, Marie-Claude! It’s always good to have a reminder about focusing your time. It’s so easy to let online promotion and “socializing” take over the main writing goal. I love your balancing suggestions!
You’ve put into words what I’ve been trying not to admit to myself. Since my husband installed a wireless network, and I can access the Internet from my laptop, I spend entirely too much time writing long, amusing e-mails and long, amusing blog posts, and not working on my novel. The blog increases my fluency, but posting gives me such a feeling of accomplishment–I’ve published!–that I don’t feel the need to do more. Thanks for making me face the truth and for proposing ways to add structure and discipline to my writing lives.
This article really struck home for me. I found myself nodding vigorously as I read it. Thanks for that.
I LOVED your article series. Thank you so much for all the information and advice. Now to put it all to good use!
Hi everyone,
I’m glad my article (and the series) gave a little food for thought. Its hard to keep the right balance, I still do struggle with it daily, but I think if we are aware of it, it’s half the battle
No matter who you are or how you look at it, balance is important in our lives. Thanks for pointing out how online social networking can both make and break us. Great post!