1. How not to Market Yourself

by Steve Rosse

There used to be a man writing fiction in Thailand.

He was a nice man, an intelligent man, and a man who was very successful in his day job.  But he was mocked by every other writer in the Kingdom because he put stickers on all his books that said, “Nominated for the Nobel Prize.”

Everybody over the age of 10 knows that the Nobel Foundation does not announce the names of nominees, so nobody knows if they’ve been nominated or not.  But this writer had sent his own books to the Foundation, and he printed his own stickers and stuck them to his own books and thus everybody who might have respected him did not.

This all happened about twenty years ago, when the self-published and self-promoted book was a rarity.  Now that on-demand publishing allows any yabbo with a word processor and a free weekend to write a novel, the vanity press project is the norm.  And many of the companies that promise to not only publish amateur work but also promote it will submit every single book they produce to the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Pushcart, the Nobel, Hugo, Nebula, Oscar, Tony, Grammy and National Special Needs Children’s Librarian Awards.  And then the amateur author will insert that poisoned sentence into his biography:  “Nominated for the Whatever Prize.”

Don’t do it, people.  Resist the temptation to trumpet laurels you have not earned.  The man in Thailand who put the gold stickers on his books was naïve to think that his audience did not know how the Nobel Prize is awarded, and he paid for it by being the laughing stock of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club.  There is no shame in being an amateur writer, or a beginning writer, or even just a writer who has yet to win any awards.  Look up your ten favorite writers and you’ll see that few, if any, won any notable awards.  Look up the list of winners of any award twenty or thirty years ago and you’ll see that you won’t recognize most of the names.

Winning awards is no guarantee of quality. Having no awards on your resume does not drive away any readers, but putting “Nominated for the Slobbinski Award” in your biography, when it’s obvious that your publisher made the nomination, will drive away readers, agents and legitimate publishers faster than putting “A Challenging Read” on the cover of your book.

Steve Rosse is a former columnist for The Nation newspaper in Bangkok.  His books are available on Amazon.com