Dana Kaye
As some of you know, in addition to being publicist extraordinaire, I am also a swimmer and coach. For the past two years, I’ve been coaching age group swimming, and even though I loved every minute of it, coaching consumes your life (5 evening practices a week, meets Saturday and Sunday). So, I decided a couple months back that this would be my last season.
Most people are multi-faceted; there is more than one thing that they’re passionate about. Alison has to balance her love of fiction with Roller Derby and Batlestar Gallactica. Barbara finds a balance between her life as an agent and her life drinking cheap polish vodka. I see writers attempting to finish their book, while writing a screenplay, blogging, submitting a short story for an anthology and, oh yeah, promoting the book they already have out. When you try to do everything, you do nothing well, so I think it’s important to know your capacity and when it’s time to say no.
Because this is a crime fiction blog, I’ll address this to writers, but obviously the theory of “you can’t do everything” applies to all. I think a lot of authors get so wrapped up in the marketing component of their career and are so focused on pleasing everyone (reviewers, their publisher, their fans) that they lose sight of the most important part of their career: writing good books. If you don’t write quality novels, you won’t have a writing career for very much longer. And if you’re not the type of person who can write ten quality pages a day, then you don’t necessarily have time to submit that short story or contribute to a weekly blog.
While promotion and expanding your name recognition are both very important aspects to your publishing career, ultimately, you need to promote a quality product. Losing focus and stretching yourself too thin with other obligations will only decrease the quality of your product and make it more difficult to sell.
So writers, you don’t need to say yes to everybody who asks you for an interview, short story contribution, or guest blog post. In fact, if all of these are hurting the writing, you shouldn’t say yes to any of them. And as much as you love to watch Battlestar Galactica while downing cheap polish vodka, that won’t pay the bills, so find a way to balance your many loves without sacrificing your work.
