A Goodreads user asked Mary L. Tabor:

Let's re-purpose the elephant-in-the-room concept to talk about social media promotion a little bit, which is almost always an awkward and unpleasant thing to talk about. But I am heartened by the way you employ it. You look to broadcast the work of others, and it doesn't feel forced or false at all. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Mary L. Tabor You know the old workshop line, “Show, don’t tell”? Maybe the best way to explain is with a concrete example. When my novel Who by Fire came out from a small press, the publicist for the book Tyson Cornell suggested I go on his Rare Bird Radio Blogtalk station. His idea was that I talk with other writers who were promoting a new book—in other words, unknowns talking to unknowns about themselves. Could we get any more boring, any more self-promotional than that? I don’t think so. And maybe it works. But it didn’t suit my way in the world.

Here’s what I suggested: Why don’t I ask folks I’ve read, find fascinating and see if they’ll come on the show. I’ll do research about them, read everything they’ve written, watch every film they’ve made in the case of the indie directory Henry Jaglom, for example. The show will be about others, not me. Tyson thought this was a great idea and he reached out for starters, through their agents if needed, to poet Dana Gioia, poet and memoir writer Molly Peacock. He also created a Goodreads book club for Who by Fire. Here’s the link: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... All the radio shows can be found there and on my website at this link: http://www.maryltabor.com/2013/10/rad...

Over the course of a year, I did 20 radio interviews about other artists: poets, novelists, essayists and filmmakers, including Gioia, Peacock, the filmmaker Henry Jaglom and many others: all about them, nada about me. The show became quite popular.

Did I sell any books? Probably not—even after the editor and CEO of Shelf Unbound: What to read next in independent publishing, Margaret Brown found my book at Book Expo in Manhattan and featured it in her magazine with an interview she did with me. I later interviewed her on the show, too—probably the only person I interviewed who had actually read my novel.

So, you might ask, what was the point? And that brings me full circle to your question about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, to why I read voraciously, to why I write: The folks I interviewed have given me the gift of my own transformation through their work. When I write, I experience this as well—even if no one is reading.

Do I hope some day that the book club and the radio show would be about my novel Who by Fire or my other work, the memoir (Re)Making Love, for example that I’m posting for free on Wattpad.com? Sure I do.

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