Tag Archives: marketing

The Banality of Self-Promotion vs. the Bogosity of Being Too Cool

15 Sunday Mar 2015

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Photo credit: David Goehring

Photo credit: David Goehring

I’m a writer. Becoming a writer was actually a lot simpler than I had imagined when I was a youth: basically I just wrote and read and wrote until I felt ok calling myself a writer. I’ve had a few minor crises about it–a crisis of genre, a struggle coming to terms with rejection–but becoming a writer was actually a breeze in most ways.

One way becoming a writer hasn’t been easy, though, has been learning to backburner a whole skillet of other interests in order to make time for writing. Making music, playing sports, continuing education, gaming–all these activities are sadly diminished for the time being and possibly for a long time to come, so that I can scrape together a few hours per week to write. But I’m even ok with that–being a writer means writing, after all, so to call myself a writer I do have to actually make the time to write.

And here’s the part about being a writer that I struggle with still: striking a balance between writing and self-promotion. I don’t have an agent. I don’t make enough from my writing to pay an agent. So if I want anyone to read my work, I have to send it out to magazines, or read it to people, or have someone want to read it for their podcast. And that takes a lot of time, time that I’d love to spend on the actual writing.

I do want people to read my stuff–I’m not Emily Dickinson. It took me a while to realize that the desire to have readers is different from (or at least doesn’t have to be the same as) the desire to be famous. I’m not nearly as interested in being famous. But I do love to have readers. As one of my ESL students wrote in an essay years ago, “when I am writing to you, I am saying please understand me.”

How much time should an artist spend on self-promotion? I’ve just spent a whole weekend sending stories out, trolling through Duotrope, writing a blog post about self-promotion. And not writing stories. How much time do you spend at your work (not necessarily your job, but your work)? How much time do you spend talking about your work?

On Rejection

05 Thursday Feb 2015

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I have an account on Duotrope that keeps tabs on how frequently magazines and websites pick up my stories for publication. Depending on where I’ve sent stuff and how recently I’ve gotten a story accepted somewhere, my acceptance rate oscillates somewhere between 5% and 15%. Which is to say, from a glass-half-empty angle, that 17-19 out of every 20 submissions I make get rejected.

And that’s ok. It took me 2687821250_097aee5078_ma while to understand that rejection is the typical outcome for submissions, even for writers much better than me. I know that every book and class on creative writing includes that warning early on: get used to rejection. But, like a lot of people, I saw those warnings (maybe 34 of those warnings) and yet still harbored the sneaking suspicion that my work was so special that somehow I wouldn’t need to get used to rejection.

I can say now that I have been used to rejection for a good long while. The part that I didn’t anticipate, though, is that you can get used to rejection and still find it painful. Having a story rejected is a little like being told “no, I will not go to prom with you.” The nineteenth time I hear that isn’t nearly as painful as the first time I heard it, but I still really hoped that the nineteenth person was going to say yes.

All of this is a long way of saying that I understand why people self-publish. I’ve sure considered self-publishing, too. But why not? What do I lose by forgoing the rejection process? What do I gain by sending work out to gatekeepers I don’t know and who are almost certain to reject it?

And you, reader? What do you lose? What do you gain?

Is Birdman Sci-Fi?

25 Sunday Jan 2015

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Birdman has had quite an effect on me since my wife and I saw it last week. While it didn’t quite hold together as totally as I’d hoped, it’s a truly ambitious movie. See it if you want to watch some very talented artists really putting themselves out there.

The movie got me thinking (again) about genre: is Birdman a sci-fi movie? I’ll avoid dropping any spoilers, but much of the movie seems to deal with what Philip K. Dick scholars call “The Reality Problem.” I spent a long time wondering whether Michael Keaton’s character, Riggan Thomson, was delusional or whether the reality being presented to the audience—Riggan’s powers, his visions, his constant companion and interlocutor—should be taken at face value. And is a movie only science fiction when the character really has telekinetic powers? If we decide Riggan was delusional, does Birdman become an art film instead?

I know terms like “science fiction” and “art film” are really marketing categories designed to sell movies to target demographics. And I hate how habituated I am to those categories. But that doesn’t mean the categories are meaningless: there is such a category as “science fiction.” Where does Birdman fit? And what other recent movie seems this hard to categorize?