Ms. Confrontational

[lydamorehouse]

If I were in a beauty-type pagent right now, I'd be Ms. Confrontational.

I think my mood took a nose-dive this morning when I got a semi-angry/semi-panicked e-mail from the people who are running a Writers' Festival that I agreed to give a workshop at in March 2011. Apparently, the internet ate some of the messages that this group tried to send me (to my Hotmail account, so, yeah, that's actually very possible...) and, anyway, they were in a tizzy because they have a printing deadline and hadn't received any information from me at all. The concern was very reasonable, but the way that the organizer wrote to me, TOTALLY rubbed me the wrong way. Especially when it looked like they'd only sent me the request for stuff yesterday. And, before it was clear that the ether had eatten some of the earlier requests they'd sent, we had a very strange/strained back and forth which ended with a very weird exchange that still kind of baffles me. I'd explained that I have dial-up and so I'm not on-line very often (this was when I was apologizing, yet a bit snippy because I thought they'd only first tried to get this information from me yesterday), and the organizer's response was, "Don't you live in the city?"

I still don't understand that reaction. I *do* live in the city. In fact, I live in the capitol city. But, what does that have to do with my ability to afford high-speed internet?

Luckily, the whole conversation got shunted to another person involved in the event, and everything got resolved, but the whole thing left me feeling sort of on EDGE.

Then, I went over to check to see if anyone had updated the Wyrdsmiths blog, and discovered a whole bunch of responses from fellow Wyrdsmiths to a re-direct post I'd put up on Saturday about author self-promotion. Of course, I was already irritated, so the thing that struck me was how insular the conversation was. Here we were talking about whether or not author self-promotion worked or not, and it seemed mightly clear to me that not one of us knew a damn thing about self-promotion... since it seemed like we were the only ones who read our own blog. So I posted that observation.

No one has responded.

The more I think about this, the more our blog becomes a really interesting experiment/testament to our ability to self-promote. We set up the Wyrdsmiths blog specifically as a promotional tool for the group as a whole. From the comments I got to my re-direct post, it's pretty clear that the majority of the Wyrdsmiths don't think web/self-promotion works. But is that circular logic? Or a self-fufilling prophecy? Or... are they right?

Would the blog be more popular if we all thought that web promotion worked? Would we spend more time/effort making the blog more effective/interesting if more of us believed in self-promotion? Or is it simply true that an author comes with a certain amount of "it" factor, and there's really nothing you can do to change that?

Interestingly, if you look at the number of people "following" Wyrdsmiths vs. the number of people "following" Tate (via subscriptions or RSS feeds or whatever it is that blogspot tracks,) Tate has almost double the number of followers. And Tate almost NEVER posts on her blog.

Which would seem to imply the latter.

Yet, I can't shake the feeling that by expecting nothing, we get nothing. Which, I think, just ended up making me more cranky/confrontational. :-)

Also, Wyrdsmiths is supposed to have a presence at the St. Paul Art Crawl this weekend. We have almost completely dropped the ball on this (which also made me cranky and confrontational), but it looks like we will be staffing a table in the lobby of the Cosmopolitan on Sunday, October 10. If you are so inclined, please feel free to stop by. We will have chapbooks for sale, and I'll have some free promotional material out, including magnets!

Whoot.

Grumble.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

If you lived in the CITY (i.e., Minneapolis) you could get citywide wireless for no more than you're probably spending on your ISP.

(/ducks)

[kellymccullough.livejournal.com]

One of the many reasons I don't buy that online self-promotion works is that for a for a period of well over six months I pushed hard on the Wyrdsmiths blog, posting regularly and really trying to attract readers. I think I managed to get our daily hit count up by something in the neighborhood of 5-10 readers at the cost of hundreds of hours of work.

Even assuming the rosiest of possible numbers from that hit count, it was a gain of at most 30 readers for about the same amount of work it would have taken me to write a novel. Had I written that novel instead, say the 3rd book of the Black School, I'd have ended up with something a whole lot more likely to have a real impact on reader numbers.

[lydamorehouse]

"...at the cost of hundreds of hours of work."

Really?

I know that if anyone actually kept a chart/careful track of the amount of hours they worked on something, it would be you, Kelly. So I don't actually doubt your numbers, what I'm surprised at is that it took you that long to compose a post... or link to it via Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

On the flipside, when I'm really trying to articulate a specific point about writing, I do find that I waste a lot of time composing... so maybe you do have a point.

I actually tend to agree with you on your main point, which is that a writer's time is much better spent WRITING than anything else.

[kellymccullough.livejournal.com]

Really. Since it was on the order of 3-5 posts a week over 6-10 months, it was hundreds of posts, and the indices part involved not just the composition time, but also extensive reading time. Now, I could make an argument that the reading time should only count for a third or something since I'd have done a lot of it anyway, but still, several hundred hours. And since I write fiction very fast, I figure it's about a short novel's worth of production time.