May 25, 2006

Publication date is this month. Every night I secretly Google myself to see if the book is out yet. I pretend to myself that I am someone else each night, Oh, let’s see if that book by Abigail Friedman is available yet on Amazon.com. This week, my publicist sent me a nice surprise, a stack of about five hundred post cards featuring the cover of my book and a couple of blurbs. It looks great. I want to send it to everyone I know, then realize how much time it will take for me to write all of the addresses. Not to mention the money for stamps. There has to be a less time-intensive way for me to make use of these cards. Because the whole problem with marketing a book, I am learning, is that it takes TIME. Time away from writing, creating, dreaming, imagining.

I’m going down to New Hampshire and Cambridge, to take my daughter who is away at school for her driving test and to pick up my son from college the next day. I’ll take a batch of postcards with me, and stop in bookstores along the way.