The Marketer Dreams of the Window Seat
It’s a dream come true to have published a novel last fall and to have books coming out this fall and next spring. From the outside it may look like I’ve had a few prolific years. Really, these three volumes represent more than a decade of slowly writing and patiently-as-possible submitting and fielding rejected manuscripts, until at last they found the right editors at the right places at the right time.
I liked talking and writing about the Alcott sisters and other women who’ve enriched my life to interested readers, sometimes getting a little more dressed up than I do for a day on the window seat. Marketing brought a small sense of power that came from taking the fate of my work in my own hands. I’m grateful for help finding lovely hosts who gave me opportunities to speak or write about my research and fiction.
But there’s also something to be said for long stretches of quiet in which to mull. For the past few months I’ve been glad to spend less time nudging a book toward readers and more time shuffling new words in my computer. Writers dream of publishing day, but when it happens, we might either be disappointed that the lights weren’t as dazzling as we’d imagined or realize how accustomed we’d gotten to the dark. I often wondered if I was waving my book in peoples’ face too much. Yes. Was I doing enough to get my book in front of potential readers? No. Was I showing enough gratitude to readers and kind strangers who blog or talk up books? No, how can there be enough?
I’m hardly alone with my ambivalence about marketing. Mention the word to many authors – often introverts like me — and you’re likely to see faces twitch. Google “marketing” and you won’t find deathless or even imaginative prose. Writers who are marketers have to decide how much effort to put into blowing small horns and how much to trust to publishing fates. There’s no clear formula for balancing the work of tending to sales and the needs of new words. It’s a world if not of spread sheets then to-do lists, which are never-ending. Like say puppy-training, gardening, or housework, lists loop around more than reach an end. (Though puppies, plants, and books give back more than kitchen counters.) The things we can cross off lists aren’t usually the important things.
Marketing aims for ever-rising numbers, making a climate of never-enough. Every small success pushes up expectations. We can cheer for sales, but if we let ourselves check rankings, perhaps and usually obsessively, we’re bound to see them dwindle. It can be as unnecessarily dismal as peeking behind the scenes of a butcher shop. Learning sales information brings thrills, disappointments, and attempts to stay sane, for with every book sighting, a greedy little voice may whisper: Hey, but why aren’t there more? I remembered that Buddhist hungry ghost with its unending appetite, fairy tales about the king whose touch turned everything terribly to gold, curses disguised as charms, and adages and advice about being careful what you wish for. The chant of never-enough isn’t a good music to create from. That needs a place of trying to feel settled where we are.
Book marketing is a game with no winners or clear stop signs. The novel I already gave a lot to, and love, still needs me. But too much attention to sales is like focusing on the wedding dresses and cake and not the marriage. Marketing means being busy, while creative writing is about allowing in idleness. A marketer has an end in mind, while when I write fiction or poems, I’m more attentive to the surprises of the present than goals.
We publish partly because there is a need to call something finished, and that’s marked in a festive way by finding readers. We make publicity efforts because selling books gives us a chance to publish more. It’s a circle, just like day to night, and just like that, we need the dark murk of creativity at least as much as we need to put our work on shelves.
Recently, I’ve spent less time with my eye on the very small crowd and more time looking inside. I swapped reading short forms on the Internet to reading longer books on my lap. I stepped away from the not so very bright lights to spend more time in the dark, spent less time reaching out and more time reaching in toward a first draft with all its mess and forgiveness. I wrote fewer blogs that I hope don’t sound too much like begging or bragging, and drafted a novel, with wide margins or many pages that not only allows but grows from mistakes. I shifted my attention from smooth surfaces to craft wrong ways where new things can happen.
I like having people read what I wrote, but that’s never been the whole reason I write. I chose this work partly because when I’m composing something new I feel more alert to the beauty of people, dogs, trees, and clouds I find along my way. Everything seems brighter. We have to dig in earth as well as set nicely cut vegetables on the table. Writers need to wear old clothes, not dress with an eye on the mirror. A time comes to leave baseball metaphors with their pitches, hits, misses. and scores. To spend less time fixing words and more time writing wrong ones, leaving lists and letters and getting back to the big space of a book. I need the closed room necessary for creation, to reenter the land of wrong turns.
Of course the marketer-in-me will be back soon enough. For now I’m enjoying time just with the raw page before getting back to peddling stories and verse I believe in, while trying to muster some grace.
