Time Spent Dreading versus Time Spent Doing

I have a new book coming out next month. Hooray!

Well, sort of hooray. It would be a bigger hooray if I weren't haunted by guilt at how little I've done to celebrate the arrival into the world of this new book child - when one of my major goals for 2019 was, for the first time, to make a serious effort to promote my books.

Partly it's because I really don't know how to promote a book effectively. I have a theory that nothing authors do in this regard really makes any difference whatsoever, at least compared to the difference made by writing a spectacularly good book.

But I did make a list - a fairly long list - of fairly simple things I ought to be doing:
1. Update my website, which hadn't been updated in . . . could it really be two YEARS?
2. Update my Amazon Author Page.
3. Update my Goodreads Author Page.
4. Reply to emails sent me by a local bookstore in reply to emails I had sent them, about possible events we could do together to publicize the book.
5. Research blogs I might reach out to for a little self-organized blog tour.
6. Contact those blogs.
7. Email my publisher to ask a few questions about how I could build upon their promotion efforts.

All of these were on a list I made on April 21. As of 8:00 this morning, I had done none of them.This meant I had spent two entire WEEKS dreading them.

So I decided this had to be do-or-die day for book promotion - or at least do-or-die morning.

By noon I had done all seven.

Here is a tally of how long each one took. Remember that they had been dreaded for fourteen days, or (not counting ten hours a night for sleeping - yes, I sleep a LOT) 196 hours.

1. Update my website: 1 hour, 45 minutes (105 minutes)
2. Update the Amazon page: 20 minutes
3. Update the Goodreads page: 10 minutes
4. Reply to the bookstore emails: 5 minutes
5. Research blogs: 15 minutes
6. Decide that I'd rather return to the publicists I used before (and adored) than organize a blog tour myself: 5 minutes - and another 5 minutes to email them
7. Email my publisher: 5 minutes

TOTAL 170 minutes - or just shy of 3 hours

196 hours for dreading! 3 hours for doing!

This is a sobering comparison.

It certainly suggests that I could improve my life considerably by cutting back on a few dozen hours of dreading in favor of a few minutes a day of doing.

There is one thing left on the list, which is deal with making bookmarks for the book. I put out an appeal on Facebook for recommendations for bookmark designers/printers and got many helpful suggestions. Now I have to do something about those suggestions. My guess is that, after days of dreading, this will take at most an hour or two.

Maybe, in fact, I should just go and do it right now (or, let's be realistic, first thing tomorrow morning), rather than dread it for another couple of weeks. What do you think?

Yeah, I think that, too.