Self Promotion

Writing well has merits in itself. It doesn't, however, take us very far if nobody knows about it. I'd hate to think that many of us will remain unknown until long after we're dead. Even then, we'd only be discovered if someone pursued the matter.

We all need to do better jobs at self-promotion. We don't necessarily even need a product to push. We need only to push our work. By product, I mean that we don't need to have a novel or a chapbook in a physical sense. Our blogs become our products.

The best promotion, of course, is publication where your contribution can be found by others. Even that is a daunting idea, though. The last time I was in a book store, there were so many titles to choose from that whole sections of the store were ignored. Let's face it; most of the time we go to a book store to fulfill a specific need.

We used to go looking at computer books. There were always at least three for our topic to choose from. We would look up a specific problem in each of the books. The book that gave us the most answers got purchased. In the absence of that, how do we promote our work?

We can become parts of blog aggregators. We can bounce around from blog to blog leaving thoughtful comments and hope that those bloggers follow us back to ours. We can include our blog addresses in our email signatures. And, we can cross our fingers.

If anyone has more ideas, please add them to the comments.