I’ve always been content to sit in the background. When we auditioned for the theater club, I wanted to be the stage manager. When we were planning a conference, I loved being the organizer rather than the keynote. Some of it has to do with my history as a pianist, forced to play recitals before an audience from the age of five. I hated being center stage. All those eyes, the breaths held in anticipation of a screw up – a wrong note, a trip over a hem, a fall off a piano bench.
Being front and center was not a goal of mine but I did find times and places where I wanted to be noticed. Publishing has been one of those but it’s difficult to be noticed in this industry. Authors have limited resources to spend promoting their own books much less those of other authors. Readers, for as much as we joke about overloaded e-readers and TBR piles by our night stands, can only buy and read so many books.
How do we stand out? How do we support each other as we try to stand out?
There’s a saying that you have to have money to make money. A similar analogy is true with publishing. You have to have readers to get more readers. Bloggers and reviewers are only interested in promoting those with larger audiences to help promote their own platform. So it’s a round-robin of need more to get more.
I’m a terrible salesman. I freely admit it. I feel guilty putting people in a position of having to decide if they want to buy what I’m selling. I was terrible with all those school sales schemes when I was a kid, and I wasn’t much better when my child was bringing home the sales sheets.
I hope that people will love my stories, that they will laugh and be entertained. I never hoped to be an international best-selling author (though it would be nice). It would be nice, however, to be an author that sells.