Writing versus marketing

A comment by a friend got me to thinking. He said that it appears you spend more time marketing your work then you do creating it. My immediate reaction was telling him it was not true, but then I got to thinking about what he had said. I have a tracking program left over from my days working as a consultant. The results are interesting and I will not bore you with the list of hours and other small detail. It turns out my friend was almost correct. However, I need to back up here and tell you what I considered marketing efforts to be. This blog is a marketing effort. It is almost demanded in today’s world that you have one. My website is obviously another marketing effort. The other major time-consuming effort in marketing is keeping up with my email about my novels and writing questions. I only considered time actually spent either in writing or marketing writing and not time spent with my family or other normal day to day to day routine items. The breakdown between writing and marketing splits in round numbers to 51% to writing and 49% to marketing. It was a surprise to me. After thinking about the results, I have come to realize that an individual writer has no other choice to spend time marketing. A mainstream author has a house with a publicity and marketing group to do that work. Any thoughts?