The necessity of self-promotion

The Washington Post Style section ran an article yesterday about author Kelly Corrigan who, despite having two books in print, had to cobble together a web site, a trailer, a book tour and other forms of self-promotion, paid entirely out of her own pocket. Apparently, she is not alone.

The article, On Web, A Most Novel Approach, says this is now a common occurrence among not-yet-well-known writers:

Book publishers actively market and promote authors, of course, particularly the big names, but for thousands of writers it's a figure-it-out-yourself world of creating book trailers, Web sites and blogs, social networking and crashing on friends' couches during a tour you arrange.

Strangely, the WP article fails to hyperlink to Corrigan's web site in its online version of the story. It's here: Kelly Corrigan.

After viewing her self-made trailer, I'm a little shocked that it helped further her career. In the first few seconds there is a shot of her dad in bed, with the voice-over saying, "He calls his bed a fart sack..." OK, I'm probably not going to read this book if that is an example of its scintillating prose. But it must have been effective. The Post article says it has been viewed more than 100,000 times, and that it helped lead to her getting a booking on a network morning show.

I've always made a distinction between writers who blog and writers who publish books. There's a little bit of class distinction there, in my mind, despite my being mostly a self-published, Internet-based writer these days. I always figured that a writer in print had MADE it, that they would be taken care of by agents and publishers once in print. This article was disillusioning. Now I see the difference between a blogger like me and a blogger/web site creator like Corrigan is that, while we're both providing our words for free, her web site and blog promote something tangible, which can be purchased, and which can provide her with an income. Her blog is an ongoing advertisement; my blog is what I'm writing right now.

Popularity

“Had-i-lay, did-i-lay, had-i-lay, pood-i-lay.”

These words don’t seem significant, yet nearly five million people have tuned in on youtube to see a young man utter this gibberish.

This is not the kind of video I normally seek out and I wouldn’t have known about it unless the young man in it, Brandon Hardesty, was featured on a recent cover of the Washington Post Magazine.

The same week the article came out about the popularity of Hardesty’s “Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make” video, my blog counter registered 1,200 hits. That’s 1,200 hits in 13 months; 1,200 hits for 66 posts, sometimes made with thought and great care, vs. millions of hits for one video made in a matter of minutes.

I have never assumed I can win over the eyeballs that watch videos of cute cats or naked sportscasters or goofy teenagers. The difference, of course, is between readers and audience. Reading requires thought, perhaps even a delayed gratification. Watching a video just requires a couple of minutes of your time. And it’s hard to imagine an essay going viral.

In other words, I am trying to console myself with the idea that I am seeking quality of readership vs. quantity. But it’s not entirely true. I still expected that more people would have read my blog by now—it’s been around for almost 15 months.

Yet, truth be told, I’ve done little to promote it, other than having it listed on a couple of web sites for writers’ organizations. I’d rather spend my small amount of free time each week writing it rather than advertising it. And I don’t know how to advertise it anyway, or how to help people find it other than sometimes posting links to it on my Facebook status line.

It goes to a deeper problem I’ve always faced as a writer—do I write for myself, or for an audience? I feel a deep satisfaction when I’m able to complete a story or essay/blog post; it feels like an accomplishment in and of itself. But there’s always another feeling there alongside it, a tiny discontent that can only be appeased if I know that the thing I have created has been seen.

So, I am looking for validation, no matter how happy the process of writing itself makes me. Not fame, but a recognition, a visibility. Without that validation, there’s always a little bit of melancholy, perhaps even a small amount of bitterness, in everything I write.

I don’t think my lack of popularity in high school can be blamed for this, though perhaps it feeds into it a tiny bit, like so many other slights in the whole history of my life, all these things feeding into what it is that makes me a writer. Without that urge for validity, maybe most writers wouldn’t write in the first place. Without that urge, I would write, but the things that I write would be entirely tucked in my drawers and never seen, not even here.

Can a writer be attention-shy and successful?

While waiting for my son on Sunday afternoon, I tried to make a short video of myself using my new (cheap) Flip camcorder and found I had nothing to say when the camera was pointed at me.

How can a person who proclaims herself to be so visual and verbal be so shy when it comes to presenting herself in person?  Aim a camera at me or have me stand up and share my thoughts in a crowd and my mind freezes, but I'm able to pour words onto a page without any hesitation, whether spontaneously or on-cue. I can more easily shape my thoughts with my fingers than my mouth.

I'd thought about creating a video for YouTube where I would read some of my musings and link to my blog, just to garner more traffic to the site. Given my discomfort at being taped or photographed, I'm obviously not going to be any kind of visual media star. I am uncomfortable being the center of attention. I prefer being on the sidelines, tucked into a corner, scribbling, or speaking among friends, in a lively give-and-take.

Would I really want to garner a lot of traffic to this site? Perhaps I would feel more shy about writing a few paragraphs of whatever was on my mind if I knew, right away, 5,000 people were waiting to devour it. The words would have too much weight, then; I'm not sure I could get them out. When I write blog posts now, it is to a quiet, unseen audience. It is the writing itself that is the focus, the joy of getting the words out and shaping ideas, without any need to persuade or influence.

Yet, I don't want to end up like women who have kept their thoughts in notebooks that are tossed into the fire or sent, unread, to the dump after they die. Is there a middle ground here? Perhaps to be just a little bit read, by a wise and selective few or by a small crowd of friends?

Mainly I write these blog posts so I will have a place to store my thoughts, which won't disappear if my hard disk crashes or my house burns down. And also so I will write something at least once a week; otherwise, the time would probably slip by and I wouldn't write anything down.

So, why should I expect readers to seek out my small musings when this is really no more an electronic version of my writer's notebook? I don't have the answer for that right now.

The lies (or embellishments) that writers and artists tell

When I was a freelance reporter in the Idaho panhandle, I met a lovely woman who was exhibiting her interior and landscape paintings at a local women’s conference. Upon seeing the extreme, exuberant color in her paintings, I immediately wanted to write a story about her, especially when she told me that she was new to the area and hadn’t had much press at that point. But what may have sealed the deal for me was when she told me that her work had appeared in Architectural Digest. This fact was prominently noted on the C.V.-like sheet she handed me.

A few weeks later I visited her in her home, a gorgeous house overlooking a lake, with carpets dyed the color of “Gauguin-green,” as she described them. We ate dinner and chatted, and then she pulled out the issue of Architectural Digest where her work had appeared. In an ad for an interior decorator, one of her earlier floral paintings was on the wall, in the background. Her work did not appear anywhere else in that or any other issue of Architectural Digest.

I didn’t know what to say. Obviously, I had been envisioning a spread or at least some small mention of the painting in the magazine, not something sitting quietly in an ad. But, seeing how it had been so important to her, in the second paragraph of my story, I stated that "her work has appeared in Architectural Digest."

I bring all this up now because I ready to send out submissions again, and for most magazines I must create a short biography, including a list of my publications, that I can attach to each submission. In the publications list on my personal web site, I mention that one of my satirical poems was excerpted in The Washington Post Magazine, in a story in which I was interviewed about the little magazine I was publishing at the time. 

I wasn’t sure whether I should even list it at all there, but, to be honest, I needed to give my publications list more variety and to pad it out with more non-vanity publications (beyond this blog or my self-published little magazines, which as I’ve noted in a past post, is where I’ve put too much of my work). I also list that I had a satirical poem published in the Post’s Style Invitational.

Since there won’t be space to explain that it was actually an excerpt of one of my poems that appeared in an article about me, I’m wondering if I should just say: “My work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Kalliope, Trestle Creek Review, … and the Washington Post Magazine.” Is this dishonest—or is it what writers and artists must do to gain attention?

I would have wanted to write about the Idaho artist whether or not she’d told me her work had appeared in Architectural Digest, but I might have used it as a selling point with the Spokesman Review when I pitched it to them. I can’t see that it hurt anything, seeing as how the talent was there, it just needed a bit of a lure to bring the press in and help discover it. And I didn't feel I was lying then, since I was quoting her on having appeared in the magazine. But I'm not so sure I can do it for myself.

It sucks that writers (and artists) can only get attention when they've already had attention. It causes us to grab any little bits and pieces of attention/publication we can muster, cobbling them together into some kind of  pattern of success until maybe embellishment itself becomes an art form.

Mea Culpa

So, I've been hearing how one should publicize one's blog by going to other people's blogs and leaving comments. Sounds easy, I thought. I found a blog about moms who write (not that I want to make this the entire focus of my own blog), specifically a posting titled "Does Motherhood Impact Women and Our Writing Careers? And If So, What About Women Writers Who Aren’t Mothers?” and left a comment describing my own recent post that asked: Do motherhood (parenthood) and creativity mix?.

And I left the link to my posting.

I felt hip and with it, thinking I'm now integrating myself into the blogosphere, until I saw my teenage son shake his head as he looked over my shoulder.

"You're not supposed to do that."

"What do you mean?"

"You're not supposed to mention your own blog posting on someone else's blog posting. You're only supposed to leave a link to your blog at the top of the comment and let people find it if they want to find it."

Apparently, this is considered shameless self-promotion. I want to apologize to the blogging community and all of cyberspace for my small act of chutzpah. I really only did it to get my site meter to maybe hit triple digits someday...

BTW, where are the rules of blogging etiquette and how do I find them?