Compassionate Marketing: One Simple Tip for Helping Yourself and
Other Writers
Compassionate
Marketing: It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Right up there with those
jumbo shrimp and original copies?
Although we are
currently in a time of turmoil in which everything about writing is changing
for everyone, there was never anything compassionate about publishing and its
handmaiden, marketing.
Writers, even
good ones, were desperate to break into publishing’s inner sanctum, and
editors, noses in the air, easily kept them at arm’s length with gauzy
obfuscations like “not right for our list.” Any unpublished writer will tell
you that publishing seemed a secret society in which the standards for
membership were unclear and forbidding. It was a Cold War, a them-vs.-us standoff.
Publishers were like the French Academy, looking down their lorgnettes at the
unwashed Impressionists banging at the salon room doors.
Now, however,
the door has been broken down. Writers are drinking coffee in thousands of
homespun salons and manning the barricades everywhere. There has seldom been a
time when so much has been written of
the writer, by the writer, or for the writer. But freedom, we need to
be reminded, carries costs. The freedom to write now wears the shackles called
marketing. If Everyperson is a writer today, Everyperson is a marketer today,
too.
Now a writer both writes
and promotes. The artist with the
right-brain sensibilities is sent off to conquer the left-brain world of
websites, blogposts, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Goodreads, Author Pages, and
book trailers. Typically alone.
In my view, this new
promotional dynamic has set writers against each other as they compete for page
views, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers. In a reminder that revolutions
are never bloodless, especially that French one, let’s not forget that the
victors can turn on each other and become as reactionary as the Old King was. (In
this blog, that’s code for Old Publishing.)
To avoid that danger, I
think writers today should challenge themselves to engage in Compassionate
Marketing whenever they can. Although they live in a shove-thy-neighbor world, I
think they could still profit from adopting a love-thy-neighbor spirit.
One little tip I can
pass along came to me in one of those eureka moments that combined learning
technology with remembering compassion.
Challenged by my
marketing director to promote my forthcoming book wherever possible, I
swallowed my promotional reticence and thought I might imitate other writers. I
had seen them cavalierly attaching their website, e-mail address, publication
credits, or forthcoming event notice to their e-mail signature line. My goal
was to imitate them, that age-old sincerest form of flattery.
I showed my marketing
director my effort, thinking that was enough in the line of shameless promotion
for me for one day. But the marketing director said I would reach more people
if I learned how to hyperlink to my website, my e-mail, and especially my new
book. That way, with a click from my e-mail signature line, anyone could reach
information about me and my book. Instantly. With little or no effort on their
part.
As the right-brained
writer I am, it took me a couple of tries, but I was soon hyperlinking to beat
the band. I don’t know what my friends and family thought of my new, lofty self-promotional
signature lines when they received e-mails from me about the family reunion, the
broken fan belt, or the dog’s trip to the vet, but I tried not to think of
those dangers as I sailed off into my new hyperlinked world.
Yet there was still this
nagging voice inside my head. It was the voice of my mother. That voice, the
one that told me that if I couldn’t say something nice I shouldn’t say anything
at all, had also told me that it was just as important to focus on others as it
was to focus on yourself. I knew she
wasn’t wrong.
As I walked the dog,
weeded the garden, and folded the laundry, the voice still nagged at me. And
then I received an e-mail from a librarian friend, reminding me of our next
book club meeting. One of the things I had always enjoyed about getting an
e-mail from her was that, under her signature line, she mentioned the book she
was currently reading. Since she was a librarian, they were always interesting
choices, and I often picked up the books recommended under her name. Best of
all, she changed the titles after she finished each book, so I always had a
fresh choice to consider.
Slapping a folded
t-shirt into the laundry basket, I had one of those EUREKA! moments every
writer lives for. What if I not only promoted myself below my signature line but promoted other writers and their books? I could engage in the premise of the
Golden Rule and do unto others what I had done unto myself. I could be more compassionate in my marketing.
I loved this idea! Now, my signature line looks something like this:
Trudy Krisher
Currently reading All the Light We
Cannot See by Anthony Doerr,
This is a practice I
have started only in the last several months, so I have only had time to
recommend Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and Deborah Solomon’s American
Mirror: The Life and Art of Normal Rockwell
as well as Anthony Doerr’s masterful novel All the Light We Cannot
See. But I can’t wait to continue to support other writers in this way.
I am grateful that I
have found a way to love, not shove, my writing neighbor. Best of all, mother’s
voice is silent.
Trudy Krisher
