That's what we strive for – helping each other. Once you find your sea legs, just pass on what you've learned to the next newbie. 🙂

Bingo, Wendy!

Devon, in your case, and maybe in the case of others, 15 minutes won't cut it. But if you promise yourself JUST 15 minutes, it lifts that cloud that hangs over the whole marketing thing. You're a perfect example of the payoff one gets from time spent marketing.

Paula, don't look at how little you did, but how much you've accomplished. :)) It's too easy to kick ourselves. You have a great plan there.

Rebecca, I'm glad you back up my 15 minutes a day idea. It doesn't take time to market that way. Okay, so marketing like Devon does is more time consuming, but the payoff is SO worth it!

So we need another word for it. My fave, "shameless self-promotion", is distasteful for the more Victorian among us — "I can't boast about myself" — and "query" must sound like an arcane practice involving herbs and bat organs, because nobody understands that either.

Perhaps "surviving". I want to eat, therefore I put myself out into the world, shamelessly, intelligently, marketably. "I'll be surviving this week" has a nice ring to it.

And you know what … God bless all those who find the concept of marketing so foreign and frightening. More work for me.

I find that I often get a response of, "Would you mind taking the lead on it? It really needs to be finished up but I haven't had time to talk to X and Y. I've copied them on this email, so see if you guys can get started without me."

My challenge is to remember to make time to query and contact editors when my schedule is full. I kick myself later for not doing it, because invariably a lull will follow when I wind up doing little more than marketing to find that next job or three.

BTW – the word of mouth "advertising" worked well for my Santa letters this year. I want to keep the number of letters manageable, yet still make enough money to help off-set my Christmas costs. Since custom letters require details about the recipients, I also want a customer base of people who already know me, or know someone who knows me well. After all, no parent should send detailed information about their kids to a total stranger.

I sent my flier to four people: My sister-in-law, one of her best friends who ordered last year, one of my best friends, and a neighbor. They circulated the flier to their friends and I had 16 orders. Small, but manageable. Next year, some of them will likely tell their friends, too. Each letter only takes about 10 minutes to write – like queries, the more you do the faster you get, so it's a decent ROI on a flier than I simply updated from last year.

I'm in talks with several of them already.

Now, that example doesn't have anything to do with marketing, but if you read between the lines…

Maybe one could spend 15 minutes less chatting on Twitter about the movie you saw last night or whatever and use it elsewhere.