If It’s ‘Self-Promotion,’ You’re Doing It Wrong

I recently wrote a letter to my grandfather in advance of his 90th birthday, and told him a bit about some of the books I’ve been reading lately. He’s never been interested in reading fantasy, my primary genre of choice, but as a child I can still remember his bookshelf full of westerns written by Louis L’amour and Zane Grey and Larry McMurtry. They were the books I read before I read fantasy, and to me they feel like the same side of a different coin.

I told him I’d written a brief review of the latest book I’d read, Brian McClellan’s The Autumn Republic, and that Mr. McClellan had been kind enough to retweet my review. In all likelihood, this meant little or nothing to my grandfather, who leaves any and all use of the computer in the capable hands of my grandmother, so I told him about the way social media has changed the way readers such as myself relate with our favorite authors – that it feels as though there’s now a fully-fledged community around the books I read, and Twitter has given me and everyone else who loves reading fantasy books an all-access pass.

Coincidentally, McClellan recently posted a blog entry titled, “An Author’s Complicated Relationship with Self-Promotion,” and Mark Lawrence followed a few days later with a response on his own blog titled, “BUY MY BOOK! An Author’s Simple Relationship With Self-Promotion.” As a fan of both authors, and as someone who serves as associate director for marketing and communication for a Texas community college, I read both men’s thoughts about marketing their own books with interest.

McClellan expressed his discomfort with self-promotion:

“From the reader’s perspective it feels like just one more person trying to sell us something and seriously aren’t we already being bombarded by that on a daily basis? It’s annoying.”

Later in the post, he described his realization that he didn’t need to feel self-conscious about his Twitter page – after all, it’s his space. He also described the different marketing approaches he has taken to the three books in the Powder Mage trilogy – saying yes to everything he could for The Promise of Blood, the first book in the series, then doing only a fraction of that for The Crimson Campaign, the second book in the series. For the recently-released The Autumn Republic, he described a more comfortable middle ground.

At this point in the blog, I knew exactly what kind of advice I would give McClellan if he had asked. A few paragraphs later, he hit on a few of those points himself:

“As a side note, I’ve generally found on social media and in forum communities that being a generally likeable, self-aware person can sometimes be the quickest way to sell a book.”

Today’s audience has a very refined bullshit detector. As McClellan said, readers are constantly being bombarded with advertising, so they recognize when an author is interacting with readers online for the sole purpose of selling books. If the author is truly there for the sole purpose of “self-promotion,” they won’t get far.

Instead, I would encourage that author to focus on connecting with his readers. For example, Victoria Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic came out Feb. 24, and rather than using her Twitter account to blatantly plug the book, her tweets described the madness and energy and panic and excitement she felt as the release date drew closer. As one of her Twitter followers, I got a better feeling for who she is, and her energy and excitement proved contagious – I found myself getting excited for the release date as well (of course, it doesn’t hurt that she’s an amazingly talented author).

At the end of the day, marketing a book is just about connecting with readers – whether that’s interacting with them on message boards or on social media or conducting interviews with websites where readers congregate. In Lawrence’s blog post, he touched on this:

“The reason I’m active online is that it’s the only way I ever get to interact with readers – that’s my readers and that’s readers of fantasy, period. As the parent of a very disabled child (age 10) the last decade has been a very isolating one – when I’m on a forum chatting about fantasy, yes that’s me self-promoting, but it’s also me socialising. Same with Facebook – yes, I’m posting pictures of my latest book or silly competitions for signed copies or whatever … but it’s also the only chance I get to see into other people’s lives – I do it for fun, for entertainment, for company, selling books is quite far down that list. If it happens to look like great marketing to agents etc … that’s really just a happy side-effect.”

Lawrence is very clearly comfortable online, and offers his readers a lot of opportunities to interact with him, whether it’s engaging him in conversation or creating contests asking fans to take a photo with one of his books. It’s obvious that he puts a lot of energy into his online presence, but it’s equally obvious that it’s something he enjoys.

If an author isn’t as comfortable as Lawrence, that’s perfectly all right too. There are plenty of other options when it comes to connecting with readers – maybe that means social media, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it means interviews, maybe it doesn’t. It’s just about making that connection, and that’s what I was really writing to my grandfather about.

There are a ton of great books being published every day, and I wish I had time to read them all. But what really has me excited about being a reader these days is that all these authors are so accessible – I can read a book on my Kindle and the moment I finish, I can pop open my browser and send a message to tell them how much I enjoyed their book. Depending on the author, I may even hear back from them the next time I’m online. As a reader, that’s terrific news. For authors looking to connect with readers who will not only buy their most recent book but the next one as well, it’s a dream come true.

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