The Art of Personal Promotion: Or How I Learned to Take My Self-Loathing to a Whole New Level

You did it!

After years of toiling away in your spare time pursuing some artistic endeavor that produced expressions of amusement and pity from all but your closest family and friends, you finally decided to launch that passion project out into the world.

Good for you!

Allow yourself a few hours to bask in your accomplishment while partaking in the inebriant of your choice. If ever there was a time to indulge, it’s now, because you’re going to need that feeling of blissful intoxication and free-floating euphoria to weather the road ahead.

Now that you’ve put your writing/illustrations/photography/music/film/animation/etc., in a place where it can be experienced by others, you may be asking yourself, “what next?” After all, there’s only so many relatives and acquaintances you can share this with, and most of us would like to reach the widest possible audience. Reasons for doing so vary, but a few of the more common motivations are:

1.) To share a meaningful part of yourself and connect with others.

2.) To add your small contribution to the continuum of human artistic expression.

3.) To earn a couple extra bucks in case the electricity unexpectedly goes out again.

4.) To give a gigantic middle-finger to the high school guidance counselor who admonished you for “wasting your time”.

5.) To repair the tear in your psyche after learning that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren’t real.

6.) To quell the existential dread that quietly gnaws at your soul and keeps you awake at night.

7.) To help balance the scales after a seismic shift occurred when Post Malone was introduced onto the artistic landscape.

Unless your work was put out by a fairly sizeable entity, it’s likely that you’re going to have to do the lion's share of the legwork when it comes to finding an audience for it. The truth is that no one is ever going to care as much as you do about what you’ve created. My brief research into self-promotion has led me to the same general strategy from various pros in the industry, which is to take the shotgun approach to social media. If you don’t have a personal website, Facebook artist page, professional Twitter account, business Instagram account, and some kind of Tumblr content, then you might as well be living in a cave, and not one of those nice caves with a nearby stream and plentiful firewood.

In addition to all this, the truly indispensable sales tool for independent artists, the thing that will transform you from an obscure nobody to a household name is……Newsletters!

Wait, what?!

Yes, that’s right folks, the same thing great grandmothers have been sending out during the holidays since time-out-of-mind is also your new secret weapon.

I know, it sounds completely ludicrous, but somehow newsletters are the preferred method of reaching out to people who might be interested in your work. It’s like waking up one morning to discover that smoke signals have supplanted cell phones.

But hey, I’m willing to learn new things, so sign me up and maybe next I can learn to play canasta and shuffleboard.

Of course, before you can send out a newsletter, you need someone, preferably several somones, to send it to. That’s where cultivating a subscriber list comes in. Sites like Mailchimp and Mailerlite have readymade templates you can create to request those sweet, sweet, email addresses, but first you need to sign-up for an account. It was during this initial sign-up process that I was asked for my physical mailing address. I thought this a bit odd as I didn’t intend on mailing out physical books or letters to people, but it turns out that the address is needed to be in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act. I looked up the Act and while perusing this little legal document the part that really jumped out at me was the $43, 280 dollar penalty levied against an infringing person for each email sent!

Doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math, if you’d sent out a newsletter to say twenty-five people, you’d owe just north of a million dollars in fines.

Now obviously that’s what the sign-up templates are for, but people are already inundated with email, so you have to give them something to entice them to fork over their address. For many artists that thing is existing content they can give away for free to lure people in. Giving folks a little taste for free is a time-honored tradition used by drug dealers and other vice peddlers around the world. It’s a technique used to turn potentially interested parties into repeat customers and is the reason my local bakery gives out free doughnut samples to weak-willed sugar addicts like myself.

Many writers give away the first book in a series to keep people coming back for the follow-up novels. In my case this isn’t a viable option as I only have the one book out at the moment and it isn’t part of a series, it isn’t even a novel, it’s a short fiction collection. Even if I did have another book in the pipeline ready to go, I worked my ass off writing the stories in that collection and my publisher worked their ass off getting the book out into the world, so I’m not particularly inclined to give away years of my work like it’s a chunk of cruller.

There are certainly other things I could do. The first idea that sprung to mind was giving away individual flash fiction and short stories. That’s a way in that makes sense to me and fits with what and how I write.

If I’m being honest the whole thing still makes me kinda queasy for a variety of reasons, mostly centered on my inherent apprehension of any kind of self-congratulatory behavior. It’s one thing to let people know that you’ve created something, but the kind of hawking of wares that real promotion requires is always going to be an uncomfortable situation for me.

That said, it seems to be the only way to make a real go of things, so I suppose I’m going to have to figure out some way forward that I can stomach.

Pardon me while I wait for the feeling to return to my fingers….