Booker prize winning author, and my uncle, J.G. Farrell had
a habit of rearranging his books so that the cover, not the spine, was facing
out in bookshops - a practice that I try to maintain on his behalf. Self-promotion
is necessary even for prize-winning traditionally published authors.
There’s always part of your job that you don’t like and for
me promotion is it. No publisher means no marketing department and no budget or
promotional experience. Therefore, a new part of my ‘job’ as a writer is, what
feels like, shameless self-promotion.
I am not alone. There is a cacophony of self-promotion by
authors online – most of them doing a better job of being heard than me. I
recently joined Goodreads.com, initially as a lover of books and recently as a
Goodreads author. It gives me the opportunity to interact with other lovers of
books, authors and, I hope, with future readers of Wild Rose. I have come across countless warnings against pushing
your book on unsuspecting discussion groups. I am advised to be a lover of
books first and hope that my contributions encourage other readers to have a
look at Wild Rose. It is a very long term strategy but feels
somewhat more natural than the brash and bewildering world of Twitter.
(@WoolleyRosie)
If you’ve read Wild
Rose, you can help by getting onto Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, then
rating the book and writing a review. If you’re on Goodreads.com you can do the
same there. If you really enjoyed it you could even recommend it to your
friends or add it to a list. If you haven’t read it…
As the new year starts, I am resolved to be out of my
pyjamas earlier in the day and to meet other mums with babies. It feels like
more shameless self-promotion and it’s hard work. Meredith loves being with
other babies and children. But I am rusty at the art of making friends with
strangers and it takes a long time to get beyond the trivia of how old your
baby is, how cute she is, how much she sleeps, eats, crawls, cries.
Whether it’s as a writer or as a new mother, self-promotion is
a long process that yields results gradually and sometimes only by chance. For
someone who might prefer just to show my spine, I have to keep working at
turning myself cover-out.
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