week two: the silver lining?

Reading Johnny Temple's article was eye-opening without being the least bit surprising. I don't feel that I learned anything new, but I thought it was really effective for Temple to draw the comparison between self-promotion in music and self-promotion in books. One of the reasons I think this comparison doesn't just occur to people naturally, particularly writers, is because a writer's perception of writing as a career is different than a musician's perception of what their career in music will be like. That came out kind of confusing-- and maybe what I'm trying to comment on is actually more of a stereotype about a "writer's disposition." That is to say that young musicians promote without even having to think about whether or not they will promote, because it is part of what they love about playing music: playing shows and touring. That's a huge part of promotion, but the musicians don't necessarily have to think about whether or not they want to play shows. Of course they do. And of course they want to tour playing their music, why wouldn't they? Obviously this is also a stereotype, but let's say for the sake of argument that many, if not most, musicians want to play their music in public. At least a little. Whether or not they have the money to do so is another story altogether, but I do think self-promotion does, to an extent, come more naturally to the up-and-coming musician than it does the writer.

Writers, for one, write alone. With few exceptions, writing is a solitary act driven by something totally unrelated to sharing the work, at least initially. Later, you may think of how audience fits into what you're writing, but at first, you are writing because you want to write. And how do you share that easily? Reading series are hard to come by in most places, and GOOD reading series are almost impossible to find. Book tours are rare and it's difficult to get a bookstore to schedule a tour stop for you if no one has ever heard of you. And besides, book readings are often awkward, forced, even anti-social. Because writing, by nature, isn't something easy to share with others in a large group. A lot of writers themselves are awkward when presented with the opportunity to read to a group of people. We're writers, not performers.

So my point is really this: if you have corporate money backing your book, they set up your book tour for you. They promote, get people to the reading. Strangers see the poster at the bookstore and show up, things like that. But when you have to do a lot of self-promotion, in creative "baton-twirling" ways or in more traditional ways, you are forced to interact with other people in the writing community. You make connections with people at bookstores, invite your writer friends, collaborate with the other artists in your life that can help you out-- graphic designers, bloggers, anyone who can be a part of your effort to get your writing out there. Otherwise, no one will ever read it or buy it, and you'll never make any money and support yourself as a writer. So I think something great about the difficulty of getting a book published and promoted is that it's made it necessary for writers to work with one another and create a real life community across the country and internationally, taking writers away from the initial incubator of creating the work and into the world of sharing that work with other people.

If it wasn't for the near-impossibility of getting real money from a major publisher for your book, we'd all be promoting and publishing via a series of e-mails with a Simon & Schuster editor or PR person that we've never met. This way, we need each other's help. Plus, there aren't enough occasions for baton twirlers. The real discussion here should be about how to get baton twirlers more jobs and more pay, right?