Personally, I think the experts finally got something right – as difficult and exhausting as writing can be, nothing compares to the challenges and misery of marketing yourself.

The sheer number of electronic pathways alone makes this experience quite daunting. (I come across that word quite often when talking about trying to sell one’s work.) And as many of us have realized, it’s not just about the sheer number of sites on the Internet, it’s the TIME you need to spend on them to make yourself credible. That’s the REAL killer. I will spend at least an hour agonizing over THIS composition.

Plus, here you are, very excited and duly proud of yourself for completing something that you spent weeks, months, and even years on and you can’t even get your sister to buy one and give it a five-star rating. You should have this HUGE celebration with all your friends. Instead, you’re spinning around like a teenager in the back seat of your old man’s Chevy, trying to add some kind of Pin to a Dashboard in a place you don’t REALLY care about. And it’s two o’clock in the damn morning!

But you’ve checked your numbers and it’s in the Amazon Bestseller 697,364 range. So you text and tweet. You create a fan page. Your blog. Your Skype. Pin, and it falls. You get in touch with all the “friends” you have and have them communicate with all the friends they have and all the friends they have, and so on. “Yeah,” they say, “I’ll get myself a copy of that new book you just published. I’ll read it, rate it, and give it a ton of stars.” Two days later and now you are at 798,621.

And then you text and tweet some more for support and ideas. But all the advice I get; I write. I consider myself a writer. Maybe not very lucid, but a writer nonetheless. I have stories inside of me. Having them there while I take care of other matters only infuriates them and this will ultimately lead to bad juju.

By nature, I am not a tweeter or a texter, a Pinner or a Tumbler. I’m not trying to trip over anything. I don’t care much about Skype, and I secretly hate all my “friends” on Facebook.

And here I am, trying to promote my book on a most probably useless site, and now it’s 3 AM in the bloody morning. I keep repeating myself: “I am a writer, I am a writer, I am a writer, I am a writer, I am a writer …