Why seanan_mcguire doesn't count

[msagara]

When I say things tongue-in-cheek, I usually forget where my tongue is and almost bite it off. I wrote:

Balancing the social with the promotional is hard. If LJ were my only on-line presence, it would be very close to impossible because putting up notices every few days in the month before a book's on sale date doesn't work for me as a reader - so I've no expectation that it will work for anyone else who's here as part of the LJ community. (Seanan McGuire doesn't count. If you ask me why, I'll explain later).

mtlawson, in his infinite mercy, asked me why seanan_mcguire didn't count. Yes, when I say infinite, I mean infinitely small.

But, it's a reasonable question, and actually, someone in real life did ask me what I thought the difference was, because seanan_mcguire does do this.

My answer to her was: Seanan is dialled up to eleven on a slow day. She is superwoman. She has cats who steal her underwear when she reaches for her suitcase, and bite her hand when she reaches for the TV remote if they happen to be watching the show she wants to surf away from. She paints, she sings, she writes songs, she writes novels -- she probably writes poetry on the side. She reads comics, watches horror movies, watches television, hatches crazy ideas for signings and launches, and thinks book book book with every other breath she takes.

Apparently this wasn't an explanation.

So. Seanan is so much Seanan on-line there's no sense at all of public persona. If you meet her off-line, you'll see what I mean. Ask her a question, she'll answer it. If she has a question, she'll ask. If the question seems odd, well. She'll still ask ("Who is Robert Jordan?"). And while she's there, she'll talk about her works in progress, her upcoming book days, her cats, her house, her background, the comics she loves, the horror movies, her book giveaways, her mother, her sister -- and nothing about any of this feels disingenuous, because none of it is.

No one wants to be disliked. I'd guess that everyone would like people to think well of them. But sometimes, in an attempt to be liked, we shove away parts of ourselves, or we remain silent about things, or we fall into personas the way normal business people fall into suits. We don't relax enough to be ourselves because we don't want to offend people we can't even see, and as a result, we're not entirely ourselves on-line.. There is nothing wrong with this. If you show up at work in cargo shorts and a polo shirt, and work is a stuffy fortune 500 business, you will probably not be working there for much longer.

But…Seanan would show up in a pumpkin orange dress, with a few ARCs of her book in her bag, and she would be so much herself that after a few minutes no one would blink, and the person in charge of the company would probably wander by and we would all discover that he's secretly a huge zombie horror movie fan, and in the end, he would take a copy of her ARC away with him, not having noticed the lack of a suit.

Okay, that was clumsy. Let me try it again with less hyperbole (although it's hard to keep hyperbole down when talking about Seanan; I'm not sure why).

Seanan is entirely herself on-line. There's a lot of stuff she doesn't post about, but that's not the point; what she does post is imbued with that self. She's written some of the best writing advice I think I've read on-line, and she comes up with useful and helpful posts that are also funny in that vein.

She'll rant when annoyed at stupid things. She'll practically sing when she's excited. She writes up to 4k words a day, which makes me feel lazy and unproductive, but that's a byproduct of me, not an intent on her part.

So, when she posts about her book day or her book reviews or her new sales, it folds into the rest of it because all of those posts are also exactly Seanan; I can practically hear her talk. She posts frequently; I think the only time there are gaps are when she's at a convention or in NYC. And even if she did post every three days about her upcoming publication date, she posts so much in the intervening times between notifications that it doesn't feel like endless title spam.

Not all of her content is spam. Not all of her interactions are about sales. She does interact with people on her LJ.

But if she failed to notice or mark her publication date? I'd probably really be worried about her.


Sigh. @=/=lj user tag.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

when I blog about writing, nobody wants to hear it

Not true. However, the people who most want to hear about writing are other writers, and it can be difficult to balance talking to new writers (who want/need to hear a certain type of information) and talking to peers (who want/need to lead a discussion on a different level), particularly if you're trying to do them in the same post.

But the horse stuff, yes. (Or <insert any other hobby>. Writers giving an insight into what it's like to be really passionate about something readers know nothing about: that's a topic that won't get old. Whether it's roses or bellringing or horses or wilderness walking or archive research or ballet or-

I really don't care what it is, I'm interested in everything. And there you have your primary promotional tool: 'this person can write interesting and emotionally engaging stuff about a topic I never thought to sample. They have interesting insights and make me reconsider the world. They can make me feel as if I am there.'

And once you have me, whether in a novel (which, these days, I am unlikely to see: bookstores carry so few interesting-to-me books or debut authors, I'm unlikely to run into any) or on a blog, I am likely to pick up that novel and read it. And if I like it, I'll buy more and tell my friends about it.

Also, not coming across as the sweaty guy with the cart full of self-published books, you remember him?

I did not see the cart, but I met someone with a T-Shirt saying 'author of x' which turned out to be self-published.

The thing I don't get about 'promote promote promote' is that we know *exactly* how many copies relentless self-promotion sells: between 200 and 500 copies, if you're lucky. There's no evidence whatsoever that self-pubbed authors get the self-promotion part wrong: they are often far more apt and agressive in social-media usage, they have much _greater_ exposure than traditionally pubbed authors. What they don't have is the writing that sucks readers in and makes them want to not only buy a copy, but tell their friends about it.

For published authors, selling those etra 500 copies has to be weighed against annoying people who otherwise would have bought the book but who now feel the writer is becoming a nuisance.