Pre-promotion or not?

I was at a book signing recently and admitted to the person in line behind me that I was about a quarter of the way through writing my book. I should note here, she is also a writer. She immediately asked me what writing conferences I had attended, if I was on Facebook, if I had a blog, etc., and began overwhelming me with all the things I was not doing to sell myself that I ‘should be doing’ in her opinion….

What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of pre-promoting yourself in the manner this person suggested?

First off, let me point out that when I was getting started, computers were room-sized boxes of blinking lights that required lots of esoteric knowledge before you could persuade them to add two numbers together. The Internet didn’t exist at all. I wrote my first novel on a typewriter. Consequently, I don’t exactly have much experience in “pre-promotion” of the sort you describe.

This does not, however, stop me from having opinions. Quite strong opinions, in fact.

I will begin with a question: What, exactly, is it that you hope to sell? Yourself? Or your books?

While you think about that, I will point out that every writing career is different. Not only that, but the way into a writing career is different for every writer. If you want some control over it (you will never have total control, but you can have some), it is worth thinking about different possibilities. You can then decide what you want to do, what you don’t want to do but are willing to put up with, and what you will never do under any circumstances whatsoever. This large-picture thinking gives you a framework for making specific small-picture decisions, like whether and when to start a blog or attend a conference.

But fundamentally, the only thing that every writer has to do is write.

There is no one best route to the top. Furthermore, “the top” has almost as many definitions as there are writers, and every definition has a multitude of different ways to reach it. The successful writers I know are successful by their own definitions, not someone else’s, and have gotten to that success by routes that suit them, not somebody else.

Back to that first question. I can name several writers for whom their writing is in large degree secondary; what they are selling is themselves. They make as much (and in some cases a lot more) money from their blogs, courses, speeches, workshops, movie rights, radio programs, podcasts, and so on, as they do from their actual writing. There is nothing wrong with this. They are all having a blast doing stuff they love doing. Most of them took to social media like dolphins take to water. They are in their element. Their definition of “the top” has to do with personal appearances and being out there in public and well-known and respected, whether or not their books are bestsellers (some are; others have only modest sales).

For this sort of writer, diving into social media straight off is very likely to be important and useful. Someone who can develop a strong following, whether on Twitter, a blog, Facebook, or any of the other outlets, will theoretically have a ready-made audience when they finally finish a book, and they can use those initial sales as a stepping stone to all the appearances and so on that they love doing so much.

There may also be some use to “pre-promoting” yourself if you are planning to skip the world of traditional publishing and go straight to self-published ebooks. To make this worth doing, though, you have to catch a large audience and maintain it until you finish your book. Given how quickly Internet buzz comes and goes, this is often best left until a week before the book goes live, even if one is planning to self-publish.

In both cases, far too many would-be writers end up promising far more than they can deliver. I know a couple of folks who have been writing about their writing for a couple of decades now, without ever producing an actual story. Their social media accounts don’t attract as much attention as they expected, because they don’t have anything to talk about but themselves (and frankly, they aren’t all that interesting). And their desperate struggles to “build an audience” soak up whatever time and energy they might have used to actually write fiction.

If what you want is to write and/or to sell your books rather than yourself, then there’s not a lot of point in doing social media until you have something to sell. There may be some value in playing around with some outlets enough to get comfortable with them, so you don’t have a learning curve when the time comes that you want to use them professionally. One does not have to do this sort of experimentation by promoting oneself as a writer, however. There are plenty of forums where you can go and just talk about your favorite books as part of the crowd. Ditto sites (and blogs like this one) where you can talk writing techniques and problems with other people. Better yet, find some groups that talk about your mutual passion for gardening, or chess, or your favorite TV show.

Publishers these days do expect writers to have some web presence, and to do some web-based promotion of their books. However, they are deeply unlikely to be impressed by empty posturing. If you have a popular web site and a lot of Twitter followers, it may be a plus for some publishers, but it won’t sell your book to them or even move it up the slush pile. Unless, that is, your popular web site and Twitter feed have multiple hundreds of thousands of hits or followers, which is essentially saying “unless you have made yourself a nationally recognized Internet celebrity.”

Conferences…well, that’s kind of a different question. I’ll talk more on that next week, since this is getting kind of long already.