Campaigning for the 36 hour day.....

Recently, I've read a few blog posts about etiquette on Twitter and in other aspects of our online lives.  

(nb: My Twitter community is based much around the world of writers, book bloggers, avid readers and moderately avid readers)

In an ideal world, all self published authors would have time to keep in touch with as many of our regular readers as possible. A priority should also be to support the wonderful book bloggers who give their time, free of charge, to help us promote our work, something I think is very important. 

As well as the book blogs, though, we see interesting posts by other authors, and want to comment on them, too, and share them around.  We want to look at their books, reading and reviewing the ones that interest us.  We want to make new contacts, be active on Goodreads, keep up our Facebook author pages, never ignore a Twitter message or an email.  We'd also like to help promote books we think are fab, reciprocate good turns done to us, and, of course, retweet back the people who retweet us (apart from those who do all their retweeting via @SomeCrapApp, of course!!).  We want to just chat to nice people who are nothing to do with the writing world, too, because writing is not all we are, right??? Yes, yes - we should do and want to do all these things!

I don't have a day job.  I don't have children.  I have a husband who doesn't make too many demands on my time, and who thinks my writing is more important than the housework.  I have very little social life - BUT!! I still find it hard to keep up with everything I 'should' be doing, although I do actually want to do most of it. I've just come back from a few days away, and have spent many hours catching up with emails, tweeting, retweeting, Goodreads fiddling about, blog reading, thanking people, following back Twitter follows - and I haven't even LOOKED at Facebook!  My plan has been to do all this today so that tomorrow I can go back to my current novel, which has been drumming its fingers and saying 'where the hell have you got to?' for the last six days.

Okay.  Look.  I try to support the blogs who feature me as much as possible. I do lots of retweets every day, but (I hope) not enough to annoy my followers, I keep up with emails, I - oh, you know.  I do as much as I can, while still leaving myself time to write, and occasionally push the hoover round and actually watch a bit of telly with my husband from about 9 pm onwards. I plan to read 2 indie books per month, but for the past two months it hasn't happened - Rose, it's not that I don't like your book, I just haven't had the time to get past 15%!  That's another thing; I've had to do quite a lot of research reading for the novel I'm currently writing, and much of my time has been taken up with that.

What I want to know is this: how on earth do people who try to do all this, AND have full or part time jobs, and children, ever find the time to write a novel to promote in the first place???? I sit back in awe of anyone who manages it!

I need 36 hours in the day, so what must it be like for them?

I suppose I just want to say, if someone doesn't RT you back, or hasn't answered your email yet, or hasn't reviewed your book when they said they would, cut them a bit of slack.  They may not be terminally rude (you soon suss out the people who are); they may just be very, very busy.

Okay, I know, I could have used the 20 minutes it took to write this post to do some retweets, instead.....