I woke up this morning and I felt paralyzed. Why? I wondered. I finished my memoir, I self-published it and now I’m marketing it: submitting it for reviews, sending emails, posting on social media. All the things one is supposed to do to market a book these days. But I am surprised to find that I don’t like it very much. Wearing a publisher’s hat doesn’t really suit me. But I have to do it anyway.

I don’t feel victimized. I made this self-publishing choice for a lot of good reasons and I’m glad I did. I hear that unless you’re a tried and true best selling author in your particular genre, you have to do most of the marketing yourself anyway. I know one writer who had his proposal rejected because the publisher felt he didn’t have enough of a social media presence. But the work involved in marketing has taken me away from what I really love to do – write.

When I got up and started moving around the house today I wondered, Where is the writer who used to live here? The woman who woke up with a story in her head nad couldn’t wait to start tapping the computer keys. The woman who got lost in a chapter for hours on end, making descriptions and conversations and story lines and characters until she’d lost time and place. Writing feels like soaring. Publishing and marketing feels like being stuck in bumper to bumper traffic with your foot on the brake.

I have to ask myself these days how to find the balance between the two. Wondering how other people feel about finding balance in their lives between what they want to do and what they need to do. Let me know how you do it. I would be so interested to know.