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| Not a performing monkey |
Self-promotion. Some people are good at it, some people love it, some people are bad at it and some people hate it. Yet publishers seem to think writers should do it, like it and be good at it. Or do they? And are they right?
Articles like this suggest all creatives — and it seems, even accountants and bus drivers — now need a personal brand if they are to succeed and that everyone (especially publishers and record labels) expects it. For a publisher, if you have an active TikTok presence, they can rely on that to bring in sales of your book, or so the argument goes. They can piggyback off your own publicity work instead of doing theirs. For some types of book, this might be true, but certainly not for all. No one is on TikTok looking for engineering textbooks. Or are they?
If you have a large following on TikTok for something you already do, it might help you sell books. If you go onto TikTok (or whatever platform your publisher currently likes) in order to sell books, I doubt it will work. Think about how you respond to people self-promoting. I unfollow or silence them. It's just advertising. (I don't mean people excitedly announcing they have a new book. I mean people going on and on and on about their one new book for weeks.) We are not all performers. When it was just 'write a blog post', that was OKish as it's just more words. I can do words. But performing monkey with an iPhone? No thanks. A lot of us became writers precisely because we want to sit in our shed/office/bedroom hiding from the world and talking to ourselves or imaginary beings. Indeed, I suspect if I did a load of self-promotion videos it would reduce sales rather than increase them. Perhaps this is, after all, a use for AI and deep fake. I could deep fake myself for TikTok and rely on its not being very good to cancel out my own not being very good, two negatives making a positive. But I really don't think it makes any difference anyway and none of my publishers has ever pressured me to do this. (I can't speak for all publishers/writers/books, obviously.)
The thing about pressure to do something is that it's usually a bad idea to fall into line. There doesn't need to be any pressure to do something that's good for you or you want to do. 'Peer pressure' is generally seen as a bad thing that drives young people to smoke, wear trousers that are too baggy, or other things their elders disapprove of. Pressure from an employer to answer your emails out of hours is seen as exploitative. Pressure from a publisher to do their job of promoting your books works only to their benefit unless you are that rare creature who actually enjoys it. Really, do what you enjoy. If that's TikTok, brilliant. If it's writing stuff online, brilliant. If it's lying on a branch doing nothing — just don't roll off!
Anne Rooney
Out now from OUP
