The bonus of being a writer is you can sit alone at your desk or Starbucks table or library corner and talk to imaginary people. I'm sure it's a stereotype but I fit it: Authors are all introverts who shudder at the idea of public exposure and — eek! — real people. Mingling terrifies me. Strangers are scary - not in the boogyman way we're taught as kids but in the 'what if they hate me' way of middle school. (Maybe I'm mentally stuck there, and that's why I like to write YA?)
But books don't promote themselves... books are shared. I'm not talking about sales - I will (and have) spend more money than I make to get my books 'out there'. I'm talking about reaching more readers, getting into hands and thoughts of people who will enjoy the story and think about it after the last page. That kind of promotion. They are shared from reader to reader in a way that, in a writer's greatest hopes, extends out picking up momentum as it goes. The best advocate to push that snowball is the author. (Wait, no, the best one is Oprah, but that's just a pipe dream). So... the very stereotypical nature of the author is actually counter intuitive to the very way the process needs to be done.
Since I'm not with a big time publisher who has a budget and team for marketing, the marketing team is me and the budget is el zippo. So I need to Talk To People.
This one just makes me laugh :D
... Today I have the honour of writing an obituary. If it takes up 300 pages to write a pregnancy story, a few months in dystopia, a day in the life of high school, how do you sum up a whole person and 104 years in 200 words? (The first answer is, you don't. I cheated and tripled the target.) But still. It's one thing to make up characters and dance them through drama. It's something else entirely to do justice to a real life with all the real love, loss, happiness. There aren't enough words.
