The Courage To Move Forward . . .
My previous post about seriously reducing the time I spend on Google+ and Diaspora revealed a huge decision for me.
The best I can affirm about it right now is that it just feels right…
Joel Friedlander said it best in his recent post, The Parable of the Little Book of Stories:
"Often, we can only guess at our own motives for what we do. Standing up, where we can be seen by others in a completely new way, takes a certain kind of courage."
The post is about a woman who'd written enough short stories to self-publish a volume just for her loved ones.
Or, so she believed…
She's ended up releasing it to the public. Do read Joel's post for the story but let me add this further snippet:
"…my friend started out with no intention of 'publishing'. She had no ISBNs, no marketing, no distribution, no publishing company name, nothing. She did it just for the enjoyment of doing it. "
I've already published my book and I'm preparing to write its companion volume. Still, moving away from common social networking and investing more time making friends in Second Life is definitely something I'm pursuing, "just for the enjoyment of doing it."
The anxiety I'd been feeling over the time spent maintaining communication in the popular social networks, while realizing the connections made were mostly shallow, is slowly ebbing away.
That anxiety was robbing me of the spirit I need to maintain the friends I already have in Second Life.
In a post I wrote back in January, Publishing Progress ~ the Highs and the Lows…, just before I'd published Notes from An Alien, I said:
"Kicking my Social Media Pre-Publication Networking into high gear was mostly a high with many low troughs that had to do with sifting the wheat from the chaff—an ongoing slog through oceans of mundane trivialities to find and connect with sources of creative and progressive relationship."
Relationship…
Back in March, in the post, Do Pre-Publication Promotion And Sanity Go Together ?, I stated my basic philosophy of Book Promotion:
"Let people get to know you, share your goals and philosophy, give them support in what they're doing; then, maybe they'll be interested in your book…
"And, even if they don't want your book, they may know someone who does."
The common social networks were not letting me follow that basic philosophy—I persisted for six months till the anxiety was so great I had to admit a few things to myself:
* Second Life lets me really get to know people and they really get to know me.
* The common social networking platforms demand, from me, an inordinate amount of effort to produce, at best, limited relationships.
* I better be sure I'm doing what helps me maintain deep relationships or I'll go crazy…
So the pain from six months (much more actually) of panning for gold in the wrong streams has called out a measure of courage—courage to go where I have the greatest odds of finding good people who I can really get to know.
It may help book sales but that's quite secondary since I , even though the book is for sale, still give it away :-)
Check out my post, Free = Sales ~ Give It Away & Sell More…
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Tagged: book marketing, book promotion, Diaspora, Google Plus, Joel Friedlander, Second Life, self-publishing, social networking
