What You Ought to be Doing is Probably What You ARE Doing....

I read a blog every day by Seth Godin who is a funny looking bald guy with yellow glasses and a giant brain and a big heart who talks about marketing.  Funny, right?  A fiction writer reading a marketing blog?  I'm thinking about him now because I just looked at a video of me giving a talk last year which I was going to cannibalize for my new website and besides relief that the evil video camera didn't make me look THAT bad and I didn't sound like I was on Quaaludes as I tend to when I've been talking for longer than 15 minutes, I winced at the part where someone asked me "what are you reading now" because it's the part I'm never prepared for although I should be by now--for god's sake, it's the one question SOMEONE always asks and afterwards I always think, "damn!  I should've plugged so and so's book" but I still have this--well, I call it an honest streak, but my husband says I haven't accepted the fact that public speaking, public reading, PUBLIC ANYTHING is just theater.  It's not about an honest exchange of ideas.  Anyway, I blurted out, "Seth Godin. All Marketer's Are Liars, and another one about finding your tribe, and another one about permission marketing."  And I saw the light go out of the questioner's face because I wasn't reading some indie press's next big thing.  I was reading about how to sell myself.  How to get the unromantic stuff (marketing) done because that separates the people who can make their dreams come true from people who just dream. But there it is.  I seldom read fiction anymore--Okay? I said it--because I'm too busy writing it and the little time I have left I'm trying to figure out how to sell my books so I can write even more. I don't think this is wrong.  Whatever it is you do when you're stressed, when you have no time is probably what you should be doing right now.  I think Seth Godin even wrote a blog about it.