Any contemporary young artists, musicians, writers, or entrepreneurs know that they have to self-promote. I’ve read and heard countless arguments that we need to “build a brand” or “construct a platform” if we want to be successful in this weird-ass digital age. The concept that our hard work will be noticed and picked up by someone who will want to pay us to do what we do is slowly disappearing down the drain of the internet, as the entire market is over-saturated with more content than can ever be read.
And the worst part is, we’re expected to do this on our own, with no real training or knowledge of the inner clockwork of good self-promotion.
It’s a sticky business though, the world of making yourself known without sounding like a total douche. It’s easy to want to scream your every success on every platform available, tweeting your retweets and booking your face all over the place, but then you risk annoying your audience. Conversely, If you don’t find and tune and toot your own horn, you might miss out on a chance to gain readership, or a chance for you to shove your crowbar of hard work into the very slightly ajar chained-door of opportunity.
My only real advice is to create good content. I still haven’t figured out the perfect mathematical formula of when and how and why to promote myself, but I never feel bad about sharing my work if I’m confident that it is at least of passable quality. Not everything is going to be perfect, but as long as I enjoyed writing it, I hope my audience will enjoy reading it.
That said, I just had a short piece published that I think is at least moderately entertaining. For anyone interested, it can be found here:
http://thedoctortjeckleburgreview.com/2012/11/14/james-joyce-the-first-hipster/
What does everyone else think about self-promotion? Dickish ego self-inflation or necessary evil to get exposure or both?
Mr. Joyce and Mr. Jones, circa 1917 and 1993, respectively.
Literature and Libation 