Wow, thank you, Alison!

“And the Master Builder, our Chief Architect, will aid us in all the creative endeavours we turn our hands to – if we remember to ask Him.”
So delighted I “saved you from going off at a tangent in the wrong direction,” Joy. You are doing very well at social media, incidentally, and very quickly too, with a good and supportive network, which is networking at its best!

As you focus on your work, you attract the attention of other people who are doing good work, or appreciate it. It has been so in my experience!

Thanks, Jenn.
Good question. Obviously, I do a little bit of promotion, but I ask myself questions. How can I get exposure for my blog while taking as little time away from my writing? Is there a way of getting my blog known that is joy and might be a mutual blessing? So I do have coffee with other writers who interest me, but that’s fun. I follow writers who interest me on Facebook and Twitter, and they follow me back. I do a bit of email correspondence, but not much. I guess if you had to answer the publisher, you’d use standard promotion techniques, and say that same things other writers do, because promoting the book would then be the final stage of the writing process.
If you have promoted unsuccessfully (and I have been unsuccessful in my early attempts at connection making) maybe God is calling you to a better way, and you just have to ask him to show you the details of that better way.

Thanks Jeff. Yes, so much of all that is joyless and draining, and yet, we panic when our work stagnates, and want to do something, anything!

Don, that is so kind of you, thank you!

Except:

What if a publisher at long last picks up my book and wants to do something with it, and then they say, “How are YOU going to promote it?” I daresay that’s not the only basis on which someone would accept or decline to publish a book, but if they’re on the edge about it, it might tip them.

Also, in defense of those of us who (unnaturally, it might be added–and in my case so far unsuccessfully as well) have allowed ourselves to be suckered into the hustler game, maybe we “cities” like 50 Shades of Grey skyrocket, and so it seems to us that really, it is not by the light and merit of our cities that they thrive, in the real world, after all. I get what you’re saying about practical atheism and I feel convicted by that, but . . . it’s a Psalm 73 thing, I guess . . .