This is a busy time in my writing career. Doing a ‘virtual book tour’, using the power of the internet to promote Focus on Healing: Holistic Self-help for Medical Illness to readers outside New Zealand, has been a new and exciting experience.
Virtual book tours have not replaced live talks and book signing events as a way for authors to market their work, but they do enable outreach to a worldwide audience through websites, blogs and media outlets, all from a home computer at reasonable cost. To sample what is involved, please click on the links for my online interview and printed chapter excerpt, recorded chapter excerpt and ezine articles; and to buy the book through my website click here.
I recently edited the wartime memoir of my late uncle, a Spitfire pilot. This book is now at proof-checking stage and will soon be published in the UK. Also this month my next self-help book, about life path and life purpose, is being considered for a local manuscript award and I will probably self-publish this one, so am studying the options. More news on both books will follow in future posts.
These editing and marketing activities have left little time for new writing, but I am keen to try my hand at fiction in the future, and have already made a start on a romantic suspense novel set here in Devonport.
All this activity is very positive, but involves rather too much ‘multitasking’ – even with the best time management skills it’s sometimes impossible to avoid everything happening at once! So I sometimes feel over-stimulated, stressed by the number of things to deal with, or impatient to get them finished. There are Bach flower remedies to balance all these states of mind: Vervain for over-enthusiasm, Elm for ‘overwhelm’, Impatiens for impatience.
Jennifer Barraclough 