Making a Man Marketable

I am not original or special for saying marketing gives me hives. I am not original for thinking, sometimes, that marketing is the devil. But what I do think is special is that, despite feeling all these things, I also think I am a filthy, cowardly liar.

Marketing is a tool. Writing is a tool, too. And I love writing despite that fact, despite the ways I use syntax, rhythm, structure to manipulate and evoke thoughts and emotions. I’m not scared to be manipulative, clearly– I’m a bastard who enjoys writing death scenes.

What scares and stresses me about marketing is one simple fact: its new to me and I am bad at it.

Okay, not bad. Mediocre. But mediocrity is still really hard for me.

Pretend you’re me, a disabled shut-in who’s been very deliberately practicing and refining my creative writing skills since I was 13. That’s 15 years. 15 years of spending at least 50% of my energy into trying to communicate my thoughts and feelings and ideas as effectively as possible through the art of words. As wonderful as that has been for my writing, its also spurred the horrible process of boomer-fying myself. By pursuing something that I have a whole high school sophomore of experience in, now everything else seems so difficult. So vindictive. Like other skills are victimizing me by being, shocker, hard at first. And when succeeding in my goals takes years of learning a nuanced new skill? I get cranky. I kick the air. I throw a lil tantrum. So yeah, I get a little boomer-y. I Karen myself in the tiresome mind palace that is my head. I am constantly dialing in so I can find and yell at the manager of life, but no one’s fucking answering.

And that’s entirely my own fault and my own problem. It’s absurd that I expect to be 15 years-deep levels of great at marketing when I’ve been practicing it for maybe a year. Even wilder that I expect it before my first ever book releases. The internet definitely isn’t very friendly when the thing you’re marketing is in years of “pending”.

We get mad anyway, though. Me and everyone else struggling with the online marketing landscape. We kick our feet. We feel frustrated. We wonder why the world isn’t fair, as if this skill has been locked away behind some magical door (it does have a dollar-bill shaped hole, but the capitalism and financial privilege of marketing is not the conversation we’re having).

But that door has keys. It isn’t unavailable to you. You’re just a baby at it right now who doesn’t know lockpicking or locksmithing and that needs to be okay. Because if you don’t accept it as okay, you’ll drive yourself crazy.

Stephen King’s On Writing or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird didn’t prepare me to market for my book. They taught me how to approach writing and improve, how to advocate for it to a small group of people, how to persevere and believe. But not how to get up on TikTok and catch the attention of thousands of strangers and a very fickle algorithm.

So we sit and we remind ourselves we’re doing our best and we’re adapting. I have hundreds more followers than last year. I get more frequent views and likes than before. People have been hooked by my book–I’m just not the viral hit I wish would happen to me, like I walk out of my writing office exhausted from plot-threading and starfish on the ground while praise just gets thrown at me.

I have worked hard on my craft and on my books. I love them and I think other people will, too. That’s enough. It has to be enough.

In other news, I’ll be trying to post more on this blog. Because one thing I do know how to do is write. So might as well use that as a marketing tool.

Let’s all get lockpicking together.