The Reluctant Self-Publicist...

Found myself in the middle of one of those conversations at work today - the ones where really nice people who don't really know about Grouse and Partridge pick up on something somehow and start to ask questions like, 'Oh, do you write?' 'What have you written?' 'Have you been published?'

I know that I should, at that point, swing into rampant self-publishing overdrive and promote my 'product' to within an inch of its life and instead I want to creep into a corner and hide until the subject changes to something else!  I find myself going 'It's only...' 'It was just...' 'It isn't very...' and then I stop talking altogether and everyone thinks I'm really odd!  

All the magazine articles and blog-posts I read tell me this is not the way to build my profile or create a following and that I need to do both of these things if I'm to sell more than a single copy on Kindle this year (and I suspect that may have been bought by a lovely relative!!)  And yet, I cannot do it.

It's not that I'm ashamed of G & P - far from it.  It's not that I don't want people to read it - I do!  Yet I cannot get past the fact that it feels a bit like bad manners to go on and on about my own books in the way I would happily do about someone else's! So worried am I that I will be considered a self centred bore that I dismiss it  all as something trivial, even though I consider that asserting my 'right to write' is one of the more important things I've ever done!  I'm terrified that people will feel the need to buy it out of duty, because they know me.  Or worse still, feel they have to be nice about it once they've read it!

This afternoon, the awkward moment passed, the conversation moved on and I was left realising the bitter truth:  I may be cut out to write the stuff but I sure as hell ain't cut out for selling it!