Friday, September 04, 2009

Vacation's Over - Now It's Time for PR

It was a lovely respite - 10 days on the lake in New Hampshire with beautiful days and deep, dark nights with loons calling across the water. If I hadn't been working on a project near to my heart, I would have relaxed more, but I knew it would be like that. It was a blessing of sorts that there's no Internet at the cabin, that we had to take our laptops to the local library to get and send email. Boy, does that focus your reading and writing!

Misty Shoreline NH

Cat Lover's Book of Days CoverBut now we're home and getting into the rapid speed-up of the fall and winter. Now it is time for me to be like Marti, the AR guru of The Art of Marketing You. I've been watching and learning from him and the others on AR who say Blog! Tweet! Facebook! And so I'm starting to blog more. And I tweet as @McFrugal (of the Clan McFrugal, of course). And I'm on Facebook not once but twice. First, for myself and keeping up with family and friends. But now also as The Cat Lover's Book of Days for the book that comes out in October. With the help of a savvy young PR professional, there's even a fan page for the book now.

Busy man on computerAnd that's where I learned another important lesson. You don't have to do it all yourself! I'm one of those who has never found it easy to delegate. I "knew" a fan page would be important. I figured I could do it myself, could understand the technology, and save some money. Wrong! I might have been able to figure it out, but probably not in time to be of any value. So through a referral I found someone who did it in a couple of days and continues to help with press releases and more.

There will always be more that needs doing than I can get done by myself. It takes me a while, but I'm learning from friends like Margaret Rome who find people like tech gurus to deal with the things that need doing, and that would otherwise take away from her incredible productivity. That's my new watchword: Outsource.

Now if only I could outsource sleeping, think how much more I could get done!!!

2 comments:

Mary said...

Oh, Peg. Facebook, Blog, Twitter or Tweeter (whatever it's called)? You'll never sleep. I gave up on Facebook pretty much and even disconnected myself from the blog for a while.

To be in that lovely New England setting for 10 days without the internet sounds divine.

;-)

Mary

Peg Silloway said...

Mary, I expect to pull back a bit after December. Right now I'm working hard to promote my new book coming out the end of next month. As a dog person it's not your cup of tea, but I'm hoping cat lovers will - well - love it! But they can't if they don't know about it, ergo Facebook and Twitter et al.

You're right, though - it was heaven NOT to feel I needed to check email because I couldn't!