How to talk about your work in public

Some notes on self-promotion for the mortified

I started writing in the olden days before social media was invented. It’s genuinely hard to imagine now, but it’s true. While I was still at school, I used to run poetry readings in a local pub, and the only way I could advertise it was to put up a hand-drawn poster and hope that people would come. Later on, I used to attend a writing group in actual, physical space, and we would sit in a desolate community room with flasks of coffee, and speculate about how to get anyone to notice our work. The best we could ever do was to get a small article in the local paper, and it quickly became obvious that nobody read those. Or, if they did, they didn’t care. The whole experience was like shouting into a vast dustbin, and only hearing your own voice echoing back. 

Yes, I know: boo-hoo, life was hard in the olden days, when a turnip was a luxurious meal etc etc. Fast forward a mere five years, and Twitter had been invented, and there were writers there, real, live writers who talked endlessly about being writers, and it seemed incredibly magical, except that some of them were incredibly annoying and talked incessantly about their own work in a way that made me want to crawl into a hole and never come out again. Once, I received a DM from a man who played the role of an obsequious Victorian gentleman in his public tweets, but was messaging backstage to berate me. ‘I’ve looked through all your tweets,’ he said, ‘And you’ve never once retweeted me. I just don’t understand why you’d do that. Everyone else retweets my work. Why not you?’ If this was how to grow your audience, I thought, I’d rather keep quiet. 

The point of all this reminiscing is not to say that the ability to self-promote is a privilege and you should all just knuckle down, nor to say that it’s terribly vulgar and real artists just stay quiet and let their work speak for itself. I hear a lot of both, and I think they’re both nonsense. The truth is that this is an unprecedented time for creative people. There are opportunities that didn’t exist before, but there’s more noise, too, and more demand. We all come at this with different capacities, abilities and preferences, and our audiences differ in what they prefer to receive. This is not an even playing field, and we should stop pretending that it is. 

At the same time, few of us can build or maintain a career without engaging with the Big, Terrifying Outside World, whether digitally or in person, and that gives a lot of us the horrors. But I don’t think it needs to be a dreadful experience. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years (and definitely taken some wrong turns, usually when blindly following advice from people who are far more extroverted than me), and I’ve ultimately realised that the best way to let others know about your work is to get rid of the word ‘promote’ altogether - it just isn’t a good fit for what creative people do. Instead, I like to tell people what my work is about, and let them make up their own minds. There’s no force, no pushiness required, and everyone involved can come away feeling good about the encounter. The guilt, which once felt crushing, has all but gone. 

At Harbour Books with Emma Gannon to celebrate our paperback launches

Having just finished a round of publicity, I thought I’d share some of the ways I approach sharing my work, in the hope that it will help a lot of you, too. It’s a method that should feel generous and generative, rather than grasping and cringeworthy, more about mindset than marketing hacks. Here are my 12 best tips.

1. Whatever anyone has told you, you have a right to do this

This shouldn’t need saying, but it does. You have the basic right to speak about your work. It is absolutely legitimate to want others to know about your work. You are allowed to want to make money from your work. There will be some people in your life who think you’re overstepping. You’re not. If you do nothing else, return to this principle again and again until it sticks.

2. Let personal sustainability be your watchword

The bottom line is this: you have to be able to do this without getting stressed, anxious, upset or burned out. I don’t just mean ‘you have to be able to cope with this for a few days and then collapse somewhere in complete exhaustion.’ I mean ‘you have to be able to carry on doing this for years and decades in comfort and enjoyment.’ You might think this is a trivial concern - a privilege to think about it at all when it’s so hard out there - but I am honestly concerned at the rate of burnout and mental-health difficulties we’re seeing in creative people. This is an occupational-health issue. If you can’t think of it any other way, consider that burnout will stop you working. But, please, just be gentle on yourself instead.

For me, that means limiting that amount that I do, even if that disappoints people; sharing my needs as an autistic person at the start of all event bookings; setting aside specific times for publicity, and closely guarding my writing time; and saying ‘no’ to opportunities that are not a great fit for me (for example, events in noisy, crowded places). In the long term, this helps me to be far more consistent and effective.

3. Cleave to your values 

However you choose to communicate, and whatever opportunities come your way, you should keep in close contact with your own values and ethics. Despite the plethora of aggressive, sales-heavy advice out there, it’s possible to do this in a way that feels authentic, kind and honest. Check in with your gut. If an approach or way of speaking would turn you off, don’t inflict it on your audience. Don’t sell out your family members for attention. If an invitation comes from a publication or person whose views make you feel uncomfortable or compromised, don’t accept it - your audience will be uncomfortable too. Your integrity speaks volumes for your work; it is part of the conversation. 

4. Choose your medium and enjoy it

You do not have to be everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s far better to choose platforms where you feel at home, and where your audience are hanging out, than to try to spread yourself too thinly in places where you don’t understand the culture. If you genuinely like being somewhere, a lot of the effort goes away. For example I focus my energies here on Substack, which I love because it lets me write longform, and Instagram, which I like because I enjoy taking photos. I quite like watching TikTok, but I don’t post on there because it’s not the kind of work I want to make; I’m not on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube because I find them exhausting.

If you hate social media altogether, that’s fine. Explore traditional print media, live events, or real-life networks. Show up in spaces where you’re fluent in the language and culture, and where the people feel like your people.

Identifying these media that are right for you will mean that your communication is more reciprocal too - you’ll find yourself genuinely interested in the people who are also hanging out there, and that means you’re more likely to enter into the flow than just broadcasting. 

5. Talk to people who are interested

I realise this sounds obvious, but your audience needs to meet the basic standard of being interested in your work. Some people won’t be, and you need to learn that this is okay -  it’s actually a huge benefit. You are not trying to convert the (imagined) heathen masses to your way of thinking; you’re trying to let people know about something they might be interested in. Trust me, the latter is far easier and more pleasant all-round. 

Creative folk on every platform notice that when they talk about their work, a small percentage of people will immediately unfollow. Let them. If they can’t basically tolerate you mentioning your work, then I am going to strongly suggest that they are not your people, and they’re doing the right thing for both of you.

The other side to this is that it’s interesting to observe any trends in the people who become your fans. How old are they? Where do they live? What are their social characteristics - social class, ethnicity, education, lifestyle? Who else do they tend to like? If you understand your people, you can tailor some of your content to interest them, and you can more easily identify other groups of people who might like your work too. Meanwhile, you can be fully yourself, rather than editing bits out of your message in case they upset the folk who don’t love you enough in the first place.

6. Be straightforward

Talk straightforwardly about your work. You don’t need to play any special tricks or perform acrobatics. You don’t need to apologise, wheedle, over-sell, or promise that ‘normal service will resume’. Just hand over the essential information: 

What are you offering? What is it about? When and where is it available?

As in, ‘I have a book coming out next month. It’s a fantasy novel about a woman who discovers that her crochet projects have magical powers. You can pre-order it now on Bookstore.org.’ I’m not saying that there aren’t other things you can do, but a lot of us get too embarrassed to do the most simple, effective thing: hand out the facts. Keep it neutral. The right people will want to know. The wrong people will never be converted. (Also, I am here for the book about magical crochet, if anyone fancies giving it a go.)

7. Keep it subjective

One of the reasons that people freeze in horror at self-promotion is that they think they have to sell, and selling means making a case for why something is incredible, life-changing, and spectacular. You don’t have to do this (and I agree that it’s unbearably embarrassing). All you have to do is to speak subjectively and authentically about your connection to the work. Talk about why the subject is important to you, how you feel about the finished piece, what inspired it, what you learned along the way. Show up as a human. It’s far more interesting, and your passion and connection is much more inviting to hear. Leave the superlatives to other people - and don’t be afraid to quote them.

8. Focus on the content, not the artefact

To sustain a conversation about your work, you need to move past talking about its surface details; ‘I’m a writer, I’ve written a book’ gets repetitive very quickly, and it’s more interesting to other writers than it is to a general audience. Instead, when writing newsletters or pitching articles, mine your own work for content. Dig deep into your own subject matter, expanding on some details, reframing others, and sharing parts of your research that didn’t make the final cut. Establish your expertise, your passion, and your continued critical engagement in the debates surrounding your subject. This will feed your own interests and offer so much more to your audience. 

Basically, keep making great work. It’ll speak for you.

9. Practise and train

It took me a long time to realise this, but it’s perfectly okay to build skills in areas peripheral to your practice - particularly the ones you find intimidating. Since I started writing, I’ve taken courses in marketing, pitching articles, creating online courses and web development. I’ve read deeply on hundreds of other topics. And you would not believe how much time I spend walking in the woods, practising imagined interview questions out loud. Nobody was born knowing how to respond in a quick-fire interview. Nobody was born knowing how to catch the eye of a newspaper editor. Sometimes you have to treat this like any other job, and develop the skillset you need. If you’re in the position to, invest in your continuing development, but there is also so much available for free out there. Keep learning. 

10. Collaborate 

You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, one of my favourite parts of my work is getting to meet other writers, and to talk about books and ideas with them. It’s (mostly) delightful (trust me, I could tell a few tales), and it’s mutually beneficial too. 

It can be so hard to keep on talking about your work; there’s a lot of repetition and the phrase ‘once more, with feeling’ becomes very relevant sometimes. Getting together with other people in your field really helps to keep conversations authentic, to spark new ideas and to take you in directions that maybe you didn’t think of before. Meanwhile, you’re crossing over to new audiences. Everyone wins. 

11. Avoid quick fixes (aka why I don’t do giveaways)

I know it’s really, really tempting to go for big, splashy promotions - like competitions and giveaways - that attract lots of new followers. But my experience is that they don’t work well at all. The problem is that they don’t attract people who are interested in your work; they attract people who are interested in free stuff in general. The best case scenario is that you get a bump in followers, and then 85 per cent of them unfollow you as soon as the giveaway is over. The worst is that some of those people will suddenly notice that you don’t align with them politically and will behave very badly in your comments. A vanishingly small number of people will say, ‘I didn’t win the competition so I’ll go out and buy the book instead.’

I realise it’s hard to maintain the level of nerve and patience to build a community slowly, but it is honestly, hand-on-heart, the best thing you can do. Focus on taking care of the people who already love your work, and use your great content to attract new people. If you give something away, give a free chapter to everyone rather than a free book to one disinterested person. It’s authentic to what you offer, and it keeps the vampires at bay.

12. Draw a line

I’m emphatic about this: you cannot live in perpetual output mode. You have to take a break sometimes. You need some time being a backstage person instead of a public person. The very nature of contemporary media means that the old promotional cycles have been erased, and we can end up perpetually outputting. If our work is a success, we feel we have to say yes to every opportunity; in leaner times, we can end up constantly grinding for attention and acclaim. But remember: this can drag you away from the thing you wanted to do in the first place. Publicise your work sometimes. For the rest of the time, read, go to galleries, watch movies, pour your thoughts into a notebook that no-one will see, engage in rambling conversations with beloved people, go for long walks, dance to the music on the radio. Most of all, make beautiful work. That’s what all this is for. 

I hope that helps. And while I’m here, I just want to mention that my most recent book, Enchantment, is about the urgency of reconnecting with our sense of wonder in these impossible times. It’s available in all good bookshops, and you can find out more here.

Take care, 

Katherine

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