I think a lot about promotion, and how a lot of creative people don’t like doing it. I hear from a lot of creative people that they want to be in a position where they can handle the actual making-stuff part and leave the selling and the hyping and the getting-the-word-out-about-the-stuff-they-made parts to someone else who’s doing it as a separate job.
For whatever reason, this attitude seems especially prevalent among other writers I meet, who find the idea of promotion distasteful. Maybe I notice this because I also used to feel awkward about promoting my work, especially after having jobs where I had to sell shit I didn’t care about. The selling at these jobs sucked so bad that I began to hate the entire idea of selling anything, especially if I was doing it to make money for some super-impersonal corporation somewhere.
Selling things for other people made me feel unclean because I was usually repeating a script someone else had written and doing things the way the company wanted me to. It also didn’t help that I was selling overpriced educational textbooks or body lotion or those lame fundraisers you get at school when you’re a kid when I clearly didn’t care about these things. This made repeating the company’s script as if it was my own words feel like one big lie.
Selling also felt disingenuous because my talking about, say, the body lotion clearly had one purpose and one purpose only: to sell that body lotion to the customer. This made the conversation different than if I were to (in some bizarre alternate universe) sit around talking about body lotion with my friends, or give lotion advice to a family member who’d happened to ask me for it. In these (again, strictly hypothetical) situations it’s not my secret intent to make the other person buy my body lotion: the end result is just to shoot the shit about the lotion itself.
Talking About Your Creative Work Shouldn’t Feel Like Selling
When I talk (or, more commonly, write) about my creative work, I try to focus on the work itself: about how it’s cool and interesting and funny in its own right, COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY OF WHETHER ANYONE BUYS IT or even reads/listens to/watches it. I try not to keep that end result in mind at all—sure, if someone buys or downloads something I’ve written, that’s great, but I want the person to take that plunge because they’re generally interested in the thing, not because I was clever enough to make them buy something they didn’t want.
I also try really hard to make talking about my work as interesting as possible in its own right, especially with this blog. When you see, say, a TV commercial for a bottled de-greasing kitchen cleaner, the makers of that commercial had the primary goal of making you buy their bottled de-greasing kitchen cleaner so they could make their bosses happy. Whether the commercial is funny, entertaining, or intellectually stimulating is strictly secondary to the main goal: to make you buy the bottled de-greasing kitchen cleaner.
When talking about my own work, I like to flip that script: I want every blog entry I’m writing to be fun and readable in its own right, so that people will want to read it regardless of some more self-interested purpose. And if that blog entry happens to get someone interested in my work, or serve as a jumping point for them to visit my webstore or even buy something, then that’s good—but that’s never my primary goal.
I think of this philosophy as being similar to, say, late night shows like David Letterman and Conan O’Brien (or Marc Maron’s WTF podcast to use a more contemporary example), where famous creative people go on the show for an interview and just talk—about their lives, about the process behind what they’re working on, and whatever random shit the host wants to talk about. And then, when all that’s over, the host will mention their new book or movie or season of their TV show, just in case you feel like checking it out in addition to that already entertaining experience you just had watching or listening to the creative person.
Shows like these are genuinely fun on their own for both viewers and the people who make them, so they’re the shining example of how something fun and enjoyable can spring from the drive to promote people’s creative work.
I follow a similar philosophy in my blog, for example, when I talked about getting Eikaiwa Bums published and focused on the process of querying it, reworking parts of my bigger Japan novel into the shorter story, and navigating the contract process. In this case I thought that readers would genuinely find those things interesting and want to read about them.
I wrote a similar piece about the writing anthology I edited last year where I explained the process of getting the project rolling, working with the different writers, how long it took, and difficulties I had managing my time while I was in the thick of it, again, because I thought those things would be interesting for people to read about on their own, completely separate from the writing anthology.
Also, when I link to other things I’ve written or books in my webstore (you know, like I just did above), my primary goal isn’t to drive sales or get people to click the link—the primary goal is to say something interesting and then to give people the opportunity to click the link if they’re interested, as a secondary goal.
Though the difference between these two philosophies may seem small, keeping it in perspective helps me out a lot—and I mean, a lot—when it comes to talking about my work in a way that feels natural.
Bottom Line: Find What Works for You, and Do It
I choose to blog because I find it an unpretentious way to reach out to people and explore topics I’m interested in related to the Day Job life, and because people who read my posts seem interested in these things too. Blogging doesn’t feel like work to me, so it’s easy to keep up with and it helps me be honest in ways I couldn’t when I was selling English textbooks or hand lotion.
If you’re one of those creative people who also shies away from selling because it feels impure, shameless, or overwhelming, you might consider finding your own way to engage with people that feels natural on its own terms, apart from any promotional-type stuff that feels like a chore.
Don’t make the mistake a lot of people make and wait to somehow magically become famous so you can pay a bunch of promotional people to do your work for you—it’s a long road to the top, and in the indie realm where people are just starting out, there’s no one else to do your work for you.
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