although having said that, i would probably have even fewer readers if i didn’t ‘invest’ my time this way.

social media’s just another distraction, in the end, and a familiar pitfall every writer has to negotiate: stop procrastinating and write.

Yet, as you pointed out, that’s what authors are expected to do these days. Thankfully, I spent two decades as a journalist and, later, corporate communicator before working up enough hubris to write a novel. So much of this comes naturally.

In the end, I see social media as the price I pay to get my name and my work out into the public space. I don’t see it as particularly onerous, just a fact of life in 21st century publishing.

For the record, I plan on maintaining my complete abstention from Facebook. There are only so many hours in the day.

(By the way, a sum of money can certainly buy us more time. I spent 18 years in Zimbabwe, where life expectancy is now around 50.)

And is time really becoming scarcer? Maybe – or maybe only if we let it. Have you seen Rusbridger’s Guardian piece on mastering Chopin’s Ballad? I think he, obviously a busy man, is right that it’s about priorities.

I learned something else about working artists when I went to Romania with my gypsy/tango/klezmer/punk band Luminescent Orchestrii. I was
excited to finally hear real gypsies play gypsy music. We were at a
wedding event before the wedding. There was a gypsy band. It was a
violinist and a guy with an electronic keyboard. They took
one look at us, figured out we were American’s a bust into Achy-Breaky
Heart. I thought “how ironic” and that’s how I told this story for a
long time until I realized, no…this is how most musicians in the
world function, and this IS gypsy music, you learn music that people
want to hear and adjust your set to the situation. I wanted to hear
gypsy music? Well, i heard it. I heard professional working musicians
responding to the situation they were in.

Artist working in the U.S. have so little chance to make a living let alone “sell out” I wont fault any that do. I am just saying it really isn’t so black and white and so simple and the needs of the artist might be different from the needs of the people consuming the art.