Selling Me

I had my first reading and book signing at a friend’s bookstore Saturday night. It reminded me of asking a woman far out of my league for a date. Though the audience was made up of friends and acquaintances, I still mingled nervously, not sure what to do with my hands, fearing the moment I must speak.

The proprietor had set up the reading like a book discussion group, participants in a circle of folding chairs. More people showed up than she anticipated. The intended circle instead became an amoeba, adapting its shape to the confines of the room. Though many had read the novel and liked it, I was still unsure of their approval, still unsteady as I sat to read. I wondered if I could get used to this kind of public exposure in the name of selling something. That’s why publishing houses have marketing departments. I think most writers are like me, in that they couldn’t sell shoes to a barefoot man walking a broken glass highway.

I have always resented the easy self-promoters our society breeds, scurrying like tweeking roaches from one all-about-me marketing opportunity to the next. They can talk about themselves and what they have accomplished without compunction or, in my experience, cessation. The personality they have likely manufactured in their promotional efforts, soaks in from the outside, eventually permeating their character and seeming to expunge any attractive human qualities they may have possessed. (This is why regular people are naturally repelled by the common sales personality) Truly disheartening for me is that this works for them. They are relentless and they succeed. They become the top executives who lean on smarter underlings, the homely jerks who date supermodels, the less talented actors who become stars, the authors who sell a persona more vibrant and compelling than the book they wrote. Some compensation for the rest of us is they may also join that sorry parade of human wreckage whose perp walks, public meltdowns, DUI mug shots and serial relationship disasters becoming fodder for celebrity obsessed media.

I wrote a good novel. Not great, but good. I want people to read it and I think they would like it, some very much so. That I must pimp myself on its behalf is so out of character for me that I feel ridiculous and self absorbed telling people about the book. Some of that is my ingrained low self esteem, part of it the training from working class parents and relatives of a generation ago, people who did without demanding credit, who accomplished fine things without boasting. To draw attention to yourself was a minor sin and the worst thing you could be was a braggart.

But unless I go out and tell people I wrote a book, and act as if I believe it is a good book, no one but a tiny publisher and my editor will know. So I will go out and sell me if that what it takes to sell the book. I’m not very good at selling me, but, at least for a while, that will be my job. I only hope I don’t get too good at it.