Hired Help!

I wanted to point you to a great resource. The Christian Author's Network Marketing Blog. There are DAILY blogs on marketing for authors. The link is here: http://canblog.typepad.com/canbookmarketing

You can read my contributions by clicking here:
http://canblog.typepad.com/canbookmarketing/tricia_goyer/

One of the things I blogged about was hiring an assistant to help with marketing, which is what I've done. You can read that here:
http://canblog.typepad.com/canbookmarketing/2007/06/need_a_little_a.html#more

After much prayer and consideration, John and I decided that it is more beneficial for me to WRITE than to spend time on marketing. Because I LOVE marketing, my answer was finding someone to help me. I found a friend from church, and she's been so helpful to me! Amy organizes my contest, blog tours, mailings, postcards, and she even posts my blogs. (I write them and then send them to her.) Then I focus my time on writing MORE articles and books. It works for me!

But in addition to creating more space for me to write, Amy does a better job of promoting my books to others than I do. She's not shy about letting others know about me and what I write ... or shy about asking others to help promote me.

Of course John and I dedicated a large part of my writing income to hire an almost full-time assistant, but maybe just hiring someone a few hours a week might be helpful for you. At first it was hard for me to "turn over" some of these things, but I'm so glad I did. In fact it helped me to step back and reevaluate other areas of my life, diving them into two things: 1) Things only I can do, and 2) Things I can get help to do. There are things only I can do: connect personally with God, be the wife and mom, and write these books. All the rest is negotiable :-)