We saw an interesting post on Twitter last week. An author wrote that he was spending more time promoting his books than writing them.

We know the feeling.

Facebook. Twitter. Blogs. Etc., etc., etc. Get the word out. Plug that book. Get another follower. Create some book trailers. Speak at a library, school, town fair, supermarket, doctor’s waiting room. (Yes, we did.) In short, SPREAD THE WORD.

Why do we spend all this time on promotion? We were asked that question by a student in a school where we recently spoke. Sigh. There are several reasons.

1. The book promotion elves are not taking any new clients.

2. The reading public, amazingly, had never heard of us before our first book came out.

3. Do you know how many books are published each year? (Um, we didn’t either. A quick check produced a figure of over 955,900 according to worldometers. The scary thing was the counter that was recording the number of published books changed every few minutes. Goodness knows what it will be when you are reading this.)

4. The cost of hiring someone to do it for us made us hyperventilate.

Seriously, book promotion is a necessary evil. Evil? Well, perhaps, time-suck would be a better term. Yes, yes, we have read the blogs from authors who tell us we should glory in promotion, look it in the eye, wrestle it into submission. We’ve also seen the posts about making book promotion our friend, lavishing it, loving it for all the good it does for us.

We admire the authors who are gung-ho about promoting their books. We marvel at them, wondering how they do it all, where they get the time. We are secretly convinced some of them have a time machine, or perhaps a Time-Turner just like Hermione in the Harry Potter series. Write a few chapters, turn back time, do some book promotion. Write a few more chapters, turn back time, do some more book promotion.

However, the small, rebellious writer in each of us resents the time spent promoting books. Time spent on promotion is time spent not writing. And writing is what we love to do. Does this mean we are going to stop blogging, tweeting, posting on facebook? No. We’re committed to our writing careers and therefore committed to promoting our books.

But if anyone has a spare Time-Turner they aren’t using, please let us know.