Tell me! -- No! Shh, don't tell!

There is a lot of literature on the web about how to self-promote your writing.  Particularly how to build a platform and use it to shout across the web.  Sites like Kristen Lamb's Blog (which I find fascinating) explain how to use social media to your advantage -- effectively, she instructs you on how to do the digital equivalent of enunciating when you speak.  But for as much noise as the make-noise-brigade, um, makes, there is a quiet backlash of people who don't want to tell anyone that their publications even exist.

This weekend, Dinty W. Moore posted a fab little article on the blog of his online magazine BREVITY.*    Moore is also a faculty member of the Ohio University graduate program in creative writing.  He's noticed recently that he has students who won't tell people their work has been published.  It's not that they're shy wallflowers -- in Moore's story, he was the one offering to make the announcement, he just needed specifics from the student -- it's that they don't want to share.

I understand some of the backlash.  There is such a thing as overkill.  Or being tactless.  I don't want you to spam me about your new book, but I do want the opportunity to find out about it.  Publications are not CIA agents, they do not need to blend in and accomplish tasks that only a select few will ever know of.  But neither do we want our publications to be politicians or Paris Hiltons, always looking for the photo op or thinking about what they could do to get a sound bite on Entertainment Tonight.

Moore points out that Facebook can be nice, or it can lead to spamming.  It's all about tact.  I've read blog articles because someone has multi-posted the subject and link on Facebook and Twitter ... but I've also been put off when a find a person's entire feed is them posting links to blog entries again and again (as in, multiple links to the same entry, or suggestions to "catch up" on their old blog posts).

I got frustrated last fall when no one in the department knew that I'd gotten two short stories published because the publications had happened over the summer.  Their "not knowing" didn't bother me as much as them behaving like I was still unpublished.  I had an awkward conversation with a faculty member who told me I'd feel much better about myself once I got something published.  Awkward because I didn't feel like I could interrupt her to explain I was published, and awkward because I didn't feel any different before my publication than I did afterward.  But more to the point: we had that conversation because she didn't know.  In fact, she couldn't have known.  I wasn't cray-cray girl running around telling everyone that I had a story pubbed, but neither had I exercised the channels in place for department promotion.  Because, to be honest, I didn't even know those channels existed!  So run out and do that now: locate the person in charge of your department newsletter and find that email address.  A quick blurb will tastefully disseminate that information without being cray-cray girl.

To make it more palatable to those who would otherwise stay silent, Moore breaks it down into "sharing" vs. "promoting," with "promoting" being the creature that maybe you don't want to ride to the finish line.  He also points out that often publications (particularly independent presses and magazines) don't get bought without word of mouth sales.  "Sharing" your publications contributes to those publications audience base.

Here are Moore's six rules of sharing:

1.     Self promotion is when you spam all of your friends and those who are barely friends and repeatedly say “buy my stuff,” or “look at my stuff.”  We don’t need daily updates.
2.     Self promotion is NOT when you share good news with fellow strugglers (like grad students in your program, or the faculty who are rooting for your success).  That’s just being part of a supportive community.
3.     To my mind, even a link on Facebook, or on your blog, or as a signature line in your e-mail (subtle, not blaring), is NOT self promotion, at least not the bad kind that folks want to scorn and avoid.  Certain people wish to know your good news, or read your poem, or buy your book, so it is fully acceptable to tell them that the work is now available.  It is, in fact, inconsiderate not to tell them.
4.     Tell them once, of course, not fifty times, and give them a clean link rather than e-mailing PDFs of everything you’ve ever written.
5.     If you assume your friends would hate you for your success rather than be pleased for you, maybe it is time to look for new friends.  Or look at yourself.
6.     Writing is not bad.  Publishing your writing is not bad.  Don’t treat it as if it were.

If you're interested, I recommend the full article.

Oh, and btw, I just got a story accepted at Enchanted Conversation! (eeee!) That was an excited noise.  And I will be posting when the issue goes live.

* I love BREVITY's nonfic mini-essays ... I just wish they'd publish one of mine.


Photo credit: Sasha Wolff at SashaW

Grab-bag

Iconic face of Rosie the Riveter poster died recently. I really wish I'd known this story, ya know, before she passed away.  She was a Michigan factory worker and seeing as her service is being held in Lansing, I'm betting she lived in Michigan all her life.

Odyssey Workshop has a new podcast up online from editor David Hartwell's 2010 Odyssey Workshop lecture on titles, titling, and using pseudonyms (Podcast #43). It was great because I find that a lot of writers worry about how to title or when to use a pseudonym and it seems like something the knowledgeable people in the industry don't want to talk about--perhaps it is more tedious than other aspects, but here we have a guy who's been an editor in the SF/F industry for over 40 years and he's willing to talk seriously about the small stuff.

The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop is now open to applications. As is the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop (early admission deadline: Jan. 31; regular deadline: Apr. 8). Both are great workshops.

One of my Odyssey workshop classmates (or Odfellows, as the alums are called), put out a novella (40,000 words) for Kindle titled Nocturne: Son of the Night.  I haven't read the whole thing, but my understanding from the first chapter is that it's a high fantasy vampire world.  40k is an awkward length to sell to a publisher -- it's about half as long as a novel and a about 20k too long for all but a couple magazines to deal with (though as I understand it, it might be the kind of thing BlackGate would serialize).  You can read the first chapter on Smashwords or buy at amazon.com.  And maybe even buy at Samshwords if you need non-Kindle formating.

I got my cats a "cat bed" so that they would stop sleeping on top of my cloth suitcase. They seem to have mixed feeling about the bed, so I doused it in cat nip and now Rosie's all about it. Ash is currently sleeping in the old box lid on my desk. I guess they'll never be happy until they have the ultimate house for cats.

Kristen Lamb has had a great series of posts of the last week about dealing with "Crappy Excuse Trolls and Procrastination Pixies." The posts are long, but it's worth scrolling back to her Dec. 31 entry to catch the entire week's notions of how to behave better beyond the New Year's Resolution.  This awesome picture is from her blog as well.  It's a "Rare Photo of Actual Procrastination Pixie Disguised as a Hamster Cage that Needs Cleaning Instead of Doing Edits on Novel."   Love it.

Over at Third Coast, Nathan Norton posts his thoughts on Resolving to Remain Resolute with Regards to Writing Resolutions.  Nathan's post, as always, is insanely witty.

Speaking of which, my New Year's Resolutions are sorta holding. I've already finished reading one novel--another freebie download from eHarlequin. What can I say? I'm a sucker for free books that you can read quickly. And the writing 500 words a day goal? ... well I have written everyday, which is a start. Haven't really broken the 500 mark every day though and that's worthy of a demerit.

In the spirit of all of the writing is what I love posts I've read and *ahem* written myself, I bring you this from The Onion:

I guess you could say I have always had a love affair with the written word. The simple, solitary act of contemplating the white expanse of the blank page, and then putting pen to paper and seeing where the words take me, is my one constant solace in an otherwise turbulent world. Yes, I must admit it: I am only truly happy when I'm writing.


Or if I'm having dinner with family and friends, or a new and interesting acquaintance I happened to meet that week and hit it off with. I'm pretty happy then, too.


But for me, it always comes back to the writing: the discipline, the stamina required, the unrelenting determination to give voice to my innermost thoughts, thoughts that illuminate the cracks and crevices of the human condition. That is my only satisfaction. That and watching a really good movie on late-night TV, like Suddenly, Last Summer. That's a great feeling, especially when you haven't seen the film in some years, and you discover anew just what it was that you loved about it in the first place. I also enjoy canoeing and windsurfing when I get a free weekend down at the beach.


And Frisbee. I love Frisbee. (read more)

The more I read about the publishing business the more I think ahead. This is good, right? Maybe. It's hard to tell when your tell your friend, "hey I'm thinking about this and this, what's your advice?" and her advice is to stop thinking so far ahead and write the damn book. Then there's things like this very interesting guest post about author branding on Sierra Godfrey's blog. And the post says yes! think about it now!

I know, I know. Those of you out there who are plugging away at writing your book or maybe just sticking your toe in the writing waters are probably thinking...look, I just need to get this book written, find an agent, get a book deal, etc. etc. and then I'll worry about a public image. I've got time for that. Publishing is a slow business.


You're right. The book should be priority number one and publishing IS slow. I got my book deal a few months ago and my book won't hit the shelves until 2012. But let me tell you, when all the good stuff starts happening, it can happen fast. And you'll be thrust from "writer" to "Author" with a capital A in a moment's time.


That's great news. You won't really feel any different (though you'll be excited) and writing will still be just as difficult (believe me.) But the change means your blog, website, twitter, facebook, etc., you know all those things you've been doing to build your platform/presence, are now your brand.


So if you've spent your time on your blog bashing books you don't like, cursing like a sailor, or only posting pictures of cats in doll outfits (or even *gasp* not blogging/tweeting/pick your poison at all), you may have to do a major overhaul or start from scratch. You don't want this stress when you're going to be facing the new stress of being contracted, editing and writing against a deadline, and figuring out all it means to be a paid author. So why not get your brand in place NOW?

And then I'm like, aha! gotcha Roni Loren, I comprehend now. (read more of her guest post).

Lastly, I am in love with Lightspeed magazine!  All SF, all online (although they have other formatting options if you're interested).  They have a really intriguing layout/look--both clean and enticing.  And they're publishing a range of writers, lesser known folk and then, last month, Ursala Le Guin.  Though I could tell it was a Le Guin story because I finished it and went huh?

Sometimes you just need to get off the net

I did work on Thanksgiving ... I just didn't accomplish anything other than my modified-NaNo goal.  Which reminds me:

13,843 / 20,000 words

Yep. I'm not going to make it to 50k this month.  But I tried and I like my project and I like the process so I don't want to give up, I want to keep making progress.  Thus the modified goal.  And along with the modified goal, the promise that I'm going to write 75k between December 21 and January 31.  There's just too much that I have to do as a composition instructor and as an overloaded grad student before December 21 for me to sit down and crank out that additional 30k this month.  I knew it was going to be a long shot when I started, but like I said, I like the spirit of the thing.

This makes me 1 for 3 on attempted NaNo's completed.  Then again, next semester I think I might have to do four NaNo-style months in a row all things considered ... but that doesn't bear more discussion at the present moment.

So I spent all this time on Thanksgiving -- between the turkey and the application writing and the writing -- reading about writers using social media. Particularly Kristen Lamb's blog.  And so I changed my twitter account from @SpeakCoffee to @EileenWiedbrauk and I tinkered with a bunch of other stuff.  In general, I spent way too much time thinking and reading about this stuff.  Yes it does feel "too early," but really I'd rather know this stuff too early than too late.  Yes, I chalk all of it up to "professional development and education," but it still can feel like a waste of an evening.

I also consider scouting the bookstore (using my new Odyssey workshop taught bookshop-scouting-skills-for-understanding-the-market) to be a professional development and education activity ... and yet somehow that seems to be more productive than exploring and teaching myself new forms of social media.  Perhaps because learning social media doesn't directly relate to writing and publishing.  Yes, it's a marketing thing.  But I don't think I'm one of the people who grows pale at the mere mention of "marketing."

I'm an okay public speaker.  I get up in front of a score of students and speak for my regular pay check.  I've done public readings of my own work--the largest crowd was probably at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and about 80 people--and I know I can do that.  I, if the need arises, can make twenty minutes of conversation with a complete stranger even if they say almost nothing (this is not a desirable situation, but hey, it's better than complete silence). I blog, I have facebook, I like computers.  ... I think my aversion to writerly-social-media-platform-building activities is based in humility.

Having a facebook "fan" page does not mean that you'll (a) finish a novel, (b) sell a novel, (c) ever have anyone read your novel and "like" your official facebook author page.  Yet there's advice out there that says someone in my position (that is, doesn't have a novel out on submission but is working on one and would like to have it published someday) should have a facebook page already.  As in Page not just Profile.  And that just strikes me as ... hubris.  Or at least vanity.

I completely believe the behave as if you're going to succeed mantra, because of course if you behave as if you're going to fail then success is nigh impossible.  But while I believe in the power of positive thinking, I also believe that while occasionally tempting fate might work, baiting her with a giant ham bone will come to no good.

What are your thoughts and opinions on such things as writer social media personae, platforms and presences?  I understand that "getting the blog" is big in terms of discussion (as is the big discussion about how if you hate to read blogs because you find them uninteresting then you shouldn't write one because you'll only write hateful, uninteresting entries).

For me, if I stopped submitting work for publication tomorrow, I'd still blog.  I like my blog. *hugs blog*  Okay, that was a corny moment.

Link grab-bag: writers, self-promotion, and Goldilocks

There's bee some interesting noise on the internet over the past six months regarding writers who promote too soon -- a definite change in the previous idea of promote as soon as possible to grow your base!  Sheesh.  Conflicting advice.  Fun.  Anyway, the don't-promote-too-soon camp has some good points to make.

I'm fascinated by this.

I was rapt by this.

Then, things started getting tricky.

I paused.

I (mentally) shifted my weight back to my heels.

Then I felt vaugely wondrous and triumphant, even though it wasn't me doing the triumphing. Or the work.

Ah, the Mystery writer

Two great videos from the same writer/singer. You might have seen the first one around the blog circuit before, but the second one caught my attention more recently so I decided to bring the "Kill 'em" video back too.






Ah. Self promotion. Monday's blog topic. Srsly.

The Saga of the Gimmick Ends ... or does it?

A few weeks ago I posted about the interesting ways people are going about publishing and promoting their work and making the distribution as much about art and creativity as much as the novel is. Here we have an update from Mike Heppner:

Mike Heppner announces the winner of the Man Talking contest: Dan Pope!

Dan Pope of Hartford, CT, has won the Man Talking contest by correctly identifying the secret phrase from Heppner's two novels, The Egg Code and Pike's Folly. As the winner, Dan will receive a single-copy handwritten edition of the final section of the Man Talking Project, "Talking," plus signed copies of the other three sections, "Talking Man," "Man," and "Man Talking." A short documentary of Mike meeting Dan for the first time and awarding him the prize will be shot in the weeks to come and posted at mikeheppner.com. Go to mikeheppner.com to see the secret phrase revealed.

Mike Heppner's Man Talking Project, an original series of three novellas and a coda, has been written about in the New Yorker on-line, the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Conversational Reading, AdFreak, Maud Newton, Media Bistro, the Millions and HTMLGiant. Clare Dudman (98 Reasons for Being) calls the project "...a brilliant piece of writing... innovative, interesting, and absorbing..." and Neil Peart (Road Show) raves "...an artful examination of modern life, and modern love, with perfect dialogue, wry humor, (and) psychological insight." An essay about the history of the project appeared in the Sept/Oct '09 issue of Poets & Writers.

The four sections were written between 2007 and 2009. One cannot find all of them in a single location, however it is possible to collect and read the project in its entirety.

Part One, Talking Man, was published in September 2008 by Small Anchor Press. Small Anchor Press is a Brooklyn-based independent press specializing in finely crafted handmade books. Talking Man can be purchased exclusively at SA's website, smallanchorpress.com. A second printing came out in February 2009.

Part Two, Man, was released in December 2008. Five hundred photocopies have been left in random locations across the United States for readers to find and comment on. Some of those comments can be read here.

Part Three, Man Talking, the third in the series (but the first to be made available), can be read for free at mikeheppner.com. Over seven thousand readers have visited since Man Talking went on-line in April 2008.

Part Four, Talking, was a contest that ran from March to September 2009. One winner received a single-copy edition of Talking, entirely handwritten by Mike Heppner, plus signed copies of Talking Man, Man, and Man Talking. The winner was the first person to correctly guess the secret phrase found in one of Heppner's two full-length novels, The Egg Code and Pike's Folly. Dan Pope of Hartford, CT, won the contest in September 2009.

The Gimmick

So you've written a book, now what's your gimmick?

I hate to sound snide, but it seems that much of the talk about literary novels by small or new name authors has much more to do with their attention grabbing activities than the novel itself.


In the most recent Poets & Writers there's an article I found fascinating written by Mike Heppner covering his alternative publishing scheme (and I mean that term in the non-sleazy context). He publishes two novels through traditional means and channels, then dead ends (he gives reasons and details in the article) then writes a novella which he posts on his website because the website was terribly sad and empty. The project evolves and he's suddenly writing four interlinking novellas. The second he publishes with a small press that he's worked with before -- I believe making chapbooks of novella two which are (were? have they sold out?) for sale in the traditional sense. Novella three consists of a print run of 500 photo copies which have been left around the country and parts of Europe with instructions to read me, then email your thoughts. Heppner is posting reactions from readers as well as their photographs of novella three in the wild.

After these three mediums what could novella four possibly be? How about one. One copy, handwritten by the author, available if you discover the secret and you're the first to contact him with the magic code/handshake/password.

I'm insanely intrigued.

Next, on Lynn Viehl's blog I came across this link to an author website that I am in love with. (Viehl seemed more annoyed than intrigued but everyone's entitled to her own opinion.) Yes, I clicked through all the messages, I am thoroughly amused and intrigued and since author Miranda July was compared to Lorrie Moore by her blurbers I'm off today to the library to go find and read her collection.

Which brings me back to the so what's your gimmick? question.

Do you need a publicity gimmick? Well you certainly need something to catch people's eyes. And I have to admit that if you are a in a situation where you can do writing as art (i.e. you have a secure, reasonably well paying day job) then why not do distribution as art as well? Eastern Michigan University has an interesting writing MA program in hybrid writing which explores these facets more thoroughly -- I always think of it as hybrid storytelling as it combines visual art with writing, with technology, with community, with ... well, with whatever you can think of.

Anyone else seen/heard anything intriguing of late?

Update: "Talking Man," the aforementioned (print) novella by Mike Heppner is still available from smallanchorpress.com in its second edition format.