A Little Help Required

Being an author is hard work, whether you are traditionally published or flying indie style, it takes energy and perseverance to get your work out there. Rather than blasting everyone with sale-sy tweets and Facebook comments, I really prefer for readers to hear about my work from other people. For some reason it seems to have more impact, don't you think?

That's why it's awesome if you can ask your fellow writers, bloggers and friends for a little help.

But how much help should you be asking for?

Knowing that everyone seems ridiculously busy, I tend to stick to small requests that will only take about 2 minutes of their time, like...

- voting for my books on Goodreads lists
- liking and tagging my books on Amazon
- sharing a Facebook post
- retweeting an important tweet for me

... stuff like that.

I've been trying to get Betwixt off the ground and have been e-mailing and messaging people with little requests for help and the other day, I suddenly felt really bad. Was I asking too much? Would I be putting people off by constantly requesting their help?

I guess it all comes down to this... I will never ask anyone to do something for me that I wouldn't be willing to do for them.

Sometimes it takes courage to ask, but I am always pleasantly surprised by how willing people are to help out.

What do you think about asking for help?
When does it become too much?