Product, price, promotion, placement, phases, platform, production. The first four are the classic four P’s of marketing. I have added phases, platform and production. Ultimately our goal is to be sound and solid in all seven P’s, and the final is production—the act of writing, but also the work of getting the sales and marketing activity going.

Writing: throughout the process it’s been important to continue to write—virtually every day, getting to exercise the writing brain. My weekly blog has been incredibly important in motivating me to hit the deadline week in and week out. I have not missed posting a weekly blog in two years.  This is the most important whip I have to keep me going.

I also work best under deadlines. These are the phases of our work. Each deadline becomes part of the timeline to reach our goals. With LET ME IN I had a goal to have it done in 2018 but life got in the way. I am about 9 months behind, but finally got it launched September 2019. The launch was only the first event. I have had multiple events since then, and am working at developing the channels of distribution I will need to make this book a success.  I am now working on Tom and Emmy (working title), a historical fiction set in the 1920s-40s.

Post printing: the big work has been getting the word out that my book exists. I began working on this awareness in 2017, when I first began my blog which is the basis for my social platform. At that time I had fewer than 100 followers of Facebook. Today I have about 330. It takes a lot of work! But progress is coming, and I continue the quest.

Much of this blog, The Year of the Book Launch, has been about the work of being an author. Setting up events, networking, continuing the journey. Some of it has been about writing, but most of it has been about the business of writing. Until a writer gets “big” the business of writing is on the writer’s shoulders—it is all about getting things done. I have a quote from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility that I have hanging from my writing lamp: “It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

I live in fear that I won’t do what needs to be done to sell the Elaine Koyama Writes brand. I have heard it said that we KNOW what we have to do. The challenge is DOING the right thing. Right now I feel torn with the sheer volume of work that needs to be done. FOCUS is fleeting. And unlike a 25-year-old, I don’t feel as though I have a lifetime to work on this career… but in fact, I do. I have MY lifetime, how ever long that may be. It could be a year, five years, 25 years. There is no guarantee at 25 or at 65 how long we have to work at this game. This is the danger of looking too far into the future.

So for today, I look at the deadlines I have to meet. A post for tomorrow. Eblasts for the holidays. Sales events that aren’t yet planned.

And like the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, I begin by writing this blog to post for tomorrow.