Being a Pimp

This is the second time I've read this article by Johnny Temple. What stood out to me the most was the way in which authors must be so hands on with their work. It doesn't matter if the book is being published by a major conglomerate or an indie publisher, the author still has to do quite a bit of work to get the word out there.

What that brings me to is this: what if said author has no idea how the hell to do it? Writer's aren't publicists, marketing schemers or advertising agents. We write and we want to get published. How do we know how to promote ourselves? Truthfully I wouldn't know how. Well I'd know some small ways, but not how to actually book a reading etc. These are things that should be taken care of for the writer. Too often nowadays, especially with the murdock dominated empire, are books left to collect dust on the shelves with the writers wondering what the hell happened. I think it's expected that our book and us are to be taken care of and promoted, but that very rarely happens.

Are we supposed to hire someone with the little advance we did make on our novel? That's not such a bad idea and might prove fruitful in the future, but is it necessary? Maybe writers should all have marketing degrees? That could seriously help. It just makes me frustrated knowing that if I happened to ever have my stupid novel, that's taking me my entire life to write, published, I would want it promoted until people were sick of hearing about it. I think everyone feels that way. So I guess I have to become the marketing, advertising and PR person as well as the writer of the book that's hopefully getting reviewed by the Times.

The publishing industry is like the sticky spiders' web that sucks us poor little writers in, getting us caught, with no way to free ourselves. We're enticed by how pretty it all looks and when we get there we realize we're dinner. Hmm...but isn't that the way of the world in general?