Why “Self-Promotion” Is B*******

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From The Millions:

The first time I ever heard the hyphenated word “self-promotion” uttered as something writers do, I was an MFA student. Seemingly every editor, author, or agent who spoke on a panel about “the publishing industry” came to tell us amateurs we had to build a platform and learn self-promotion. The work doesn’t stop when you sign your book contract, they said. The book isn’t going to sell itself; you have to.

As a debut author with an essay collection published through a small independent press, I understand how important it is for writers to participate in promoting their book. What made me wince 10 years ago, when the writing world was new to me, and what bothers me now, as a rookie author, is the continued proliferation of the word self-promotionand its associated misconceptions.

Book-tour angst is real. Maybe you saw the recent essay former Congressman Steve Israel penned for The New York Times, “Why a Book Tour Is More Brutal Than a Political Campaign,” where he wonders why “rejection in politics rolled off my back while even one person’s rejection of my book sticks in my craw?” He says, “sitting behind a pile of books at an Authors Night, watching people pick up your book as if it’s a piece of spongy fruit at the market, is sheer torture.”

What if the years we spent laboring over a manuscript in private become a product the public never finds out about, or worse, discovers and ignores? It seems most authors have a self-effacing story to share about poorly attended readings, like the one Tom McAllister opens with in  “Who Will Buy Your Book?”

It’d be disingenuous of me to pretend that rejections to requests for readings and reviews don’t sting. Of course they do. But my beef with self-promotion’s existence in publishing is the word’s power to conflate the work and the person who wrote it. Writers are not politicians whose entire curriculum vitae are to be endorsed or condemned. We’re not campaigning to sell ourselves during an election of literary minded voters. We’re selling our work.

What writers do in the necessary stage of discussing their books online and at in-person events is not an ego-driven series of acts trying to draw attention to the self, but rather an extension of the private labor that has become public.

. . . .

Maybe self-promotion is such an uncomfortable phrase for many writers because of its associations to self-absorption, self-adulation, self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, self-congratulations, self-interests, selfishness, and so on. Self-promotion is laden with the solipsistic ugliness of narcissism, of navel-gazing.

. . . .

I’m more comfortable with the word sharing. That’s what we’re doing. We share updates about our work and where we will be physically sharing it, as well as sharing ourselves in the way we read, answer questions, and talk to book buyers when we sign their copies.

Link to the rest at The Millions

PG suggests that it’s 2019, not 1959.

For 99.5% of authors, book tours are a waste of time, an exercise that publishers suggest because they haven’t had an original thought about marketing in hundreds of years.

For the other 0.5% of authors, the ones who are already famous and have lots of readers, book tours are still a waste of time. Ten cities in ten days, 500 books sold per city, 5,000 books sold overall, three days to prepare, ten days to recover. One viral Youtube video will sell far more than 5,000 books and you don’t have to lie down for a week afterwards.

PG did a quick Google search of hand selling.

Every single result on the first page related to selling books.

Why might that be?

Perhaps because the book business is the only business that still believes hand selling is a great idea for something less expensive than a Harley Davidson.

Non Omnia Possumus Omnes

4 thoughts on “Why “Self-Promotion” Is B*******”

  1. “As a debut author with an essay collection”

    I’m curious just how big he thinks the market is for essay collections by unknown authors.

    He might not be all that well prepared to make a living at this.

  2. > “sitting behind a pile of books at an Authors Night, watching people pick up your book as if it’s a piece of spongy fruit at the market, is sheer torture.”

    That’s the difference between facing your public directly, and a roomful of selected supporters in a controlled venue.

    I’ve been trying to find that old TV interview when Dan Rather tried to punk Gene Simmons, and ol’ Gene showed him there was a difference between blithering at a camera on a closed set and being one of the gods of rock and roll.

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