The business of writing…
Outstanding post by Kevin over on Where There’s Smoke :
Your readers— past, present and future—are busy people with families, careers and lives. They have a zillion forms of entertainment to choose from other than your book. You wanna get to the top of their reading pile? Why not put a little godamn effort into getting out there and promoting yourself? Musicians go on tour. Actors do junkets for their shows, artists drink crappy wine and make small talk at galleries. It is hight of arrogance that writers think they somehow get a bye from all of this because it either makes them uncomfortable or because their art is practiced in solitude.
Read the whole thing – on one hand, it’s a great reaction to a Salon article that criticizes the state of modern publishing without offering any constructive ideas on how an author can improve his or her situation.
On a deeper level, however, many of Kevin’s suggestions point to a concept I was flogging a while back (and which I’m meaning, once I have time to write something not about the video industry between 1975 and 1990, to start flogging once again): the shift in media consumption from buying a product to paying an artist (see my posts on Buying vs. Tipping). Many of these suggestions, from a mailing list to public speaking, aren’t just about marketing a given book, but are fundamentally about marketing yourself as a writer. Kev gets this on a deep level, and his Virtual Book Tour is an example of such promotion in practice, leveraging new technology to introduce the writer to a broader audience of readers.