Self-promotion is essential for ALL writers.
If you’re a new writer, the first time the reality of this fact is brought home to you may be when you get a multi-page screed from your publisher’s PR department (which consists of an unpaid intern) asking you exactly how you intend promoting your book.
Unfortunately, by the time you receive this screed, it’s too late to successfully promote that book, but you’ve learned a lesson for the future – for writers, it’s all about promotion, all the time.
Unpleasant? No, it’s reality. No one takes the promotion of your writing off your shoulders. You have to do it if you want a reasonable writing career.
I tell my writing students that there are two aspects to their writing, and they need to do both every day: creation, and promotion.
Your promotion is what you make it. Paperback Writer has a very funny post on self-promotion:
The authors each had the requisite soft-focus Glamour Shot portrait and wrote patently phony but definitely chipper posts peddling themselves and their fiction. Most of them used that cutesy rah-rah pompom-shaking perky quasi-girlie talk so beloved by certain publishers and writer organizations that drives me right out of my skull.
She concludes with: “We each need to find what sets us apart from each other, not what makes us into all one big blur, and build on that uniqueness.”
This is the most useful brief explanation of a Unique Selling Proposition I’ve ever read.
Be real when you promote; be yourself (but don’t whine, ever, where anyone can read it.) The more you’re you, the more people will remember you… and will buy your writing.
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