Around The Insurmountable Mountain

The 'insurmountable mountain' all of us seem to face is time . . . time to give all these hundreds of marketing sites time and still have time to write and live up to the other countless demands on our time by all the responsibilities in our lives.

I have met so many nice and interesting writers in places like this and its many counterparts. Everyday my email box is filled with messages of friend invites, comments made here and there, and information on other authors' work and websites. A person would need ten hours a day to do no more than keep up with all these many sites and the authors one meets on them. Not to mention creating and updating your own pages almost continously. And daily, more 'promotion' sites are being started. I'm curious as to how many of you are actually buying another author's work based solely on a page you've browsed here or elsewhere? How many of you have experienced an increase in sales that you can attribute to your page or your efforts on one of these sites? What is your true motivation behind building friend lists of multi-hundreds of other authors? Even getting your own photo on another's page is a waste of time when it is buried five or six pages down. Do the rest of you actually take time to go 'view all' of someone else's 376 friends on the 'view all my friends' feature? What is the purpose of this?

Am I the only frustrated author that sees all this as an effort in futility? Shouldn't there be one big Independent Author site where authors are categorized by genre, have one profile page listing only their work, covers, and a short bio? Friends are made in active discussion forums that are listed and on going instead of these massive collections of fragments? Who out there has time to get involved in checking out blog after blog after blog which are usually comprised of just more self-promotion? Does anyone really just come here to do nothing but browse, shop, or buy a book? If not, your time is being wasted. It's just that bottom line simple. If Independent authors don't start 'buying' each other's books based solely on their own reading choices, we should all be out and amongst the 'readers'. Not hanging around computer sites with other authors who aren't buying anyway. Sometimes, one just has to go around the mountain until there exists a 'team of climbers'.