Promoting books

For the past two months, I've spent a lot of time learning different ways to promote my books. The latest one, Fly With The Mourning Dove, has received some good reviews. I also learned how to promote my only POD book, which I reissued after the publisher who first published it went out of business. I now own all rights to Wandering In The Shadows of Time: An Ozarks Odyssey and am sending out excerpts to magazines for publication as a way of promoting the book. I learned this at a conference in May. We'll see how it works.
Promoting takes a lot of time, especially doing it online, but sites like this one are a big help. I've joined several in an effort to get my name and my book titles before the reading public.
And all the while, as other books sit in line at several publishers, I find that writing is still my first love. Not promoting, not surfing the Internet, but writing. So there are two more in the works.
If you think being published gives you a better chance to get published again, why think again. When the line publishing my historical romances closed down before I could get a good following, I lost my place at the publisher. Have been wandering ever since, trying to find a place for my fiction.
Probably if I'd settle down to one genre I might be more successful. I have a western historical with a female protagonist (not a romance) at a publisher; I have two women's fiction novels at publishers; I have a proposal and first book of a mystery series that takes place in a fictional town in Arkansas; I'm writing a western contemporary fantasy and another women's fiction.
And no, it's not easier for me to be published because I have been. Probably harder, because I didn't get a chance to build up my readership. My books did well, but not great, probably because I really shouldn't have been writing romances. It was a fluke to begin with, but try finding a publisher who wants a straight western historical with a woman protagonist who isn't a romance publisher.
That's enough for today. Hope someone reads this.
It's hard to know who is reading our blogs. I have two more.
One is about Arkansas outlaws and heroes at www.velda-brotherton.blogspot.com; the other is on writing at www.vbrotherton.blogspot.com in case anyone is interested.
Check out my website for pictures and excerpts. Check out my website at authors den for excerpts from some of my short stories which have been published in anthologies.
Talk to you later, and if you're writing, keep writing; if you're reading, keep reading.