Hey everyone! Really glad right now that there’s no video involved with this blog. LOL. Just got finished with some time on my bike, and I’m a hot, sweaty mess. LOL.

While I was pedaling, I reminded myself that I don’t like to live my life by excuses. Not with my weight any more. In the last six months since my surgery, I’ve learned to embrace the need for exercise each day. Even adjusted my sleep schedule to fit a 15 minute bike ride in every morning before I get working. Why? Because I have to do the work if I want to get to a healthy weight. It didn’t come on overnight, and it’s not going away that way, either.

The same ideal can be applied to promoting and writing books. I can list dozens of excuses why I didn’t promote today, or put off writing, without even thinking about it. But that’s what they are. Excuses. There’s hardly a good reason among them. It comes down to two hard and fast rules.

Books won’t write themselves. I have to sit down and do it.

Books won’t magically start to sell overnight. I have to promote them.

That’s it. If I want my books to sell, I have to promote them. Me. Not my publisher. Not my friends. Not any store or con I get a table at. I have to do the work.

Authors simply can not rely on anyone else to do the work for them. Even if we had the money to hire a publicist, I’d still be doing some promotion. Why? Because I should be.

Success, however you define it, isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, sweat, tears, trial and error. It needs me to push forward, work that extra five minutes every day. Ignore the doubt in my own head and get on Twitter.

It takes the same amount of effort I’m putting into my health.

Stop making excuses for why your book isn’t meeting your expectations and put in the work. Try something new, or polish up an old website. Take a deep breath and do a cold call to a local store about hosting you for an event.

Rearrange your life so you can start making being an author a priority, something that has to be done every single day. Because it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take years. And the longer you sit back and make excuses, the longer it’s going to take.

BB