Black Static

I recently read a very interesting post on 'Selling Yourself' by Black Static contributor Gary McMahon, and if you scroll down to the foot of the page and click on the first link you can read it too.

If Gary's to be believed, and I see no reason not to, then the days of the writer as simply talent are well and truly over, and he or she has to dirty their hands with the sordid commercial side of things, talking up their creation to the world and endlessly hustling for the next sale.

In parenthesis, I pause to wonder if this thing with the 'self-promotion' pack that Gary mentioned is peculiar to genre fiction or has a wider application. The thought of the likes of Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and all the other g-literati learning to tweet and setting out their stalls on facebook appeals to me no end.

As far as the internet goes, it seems to me that self-promotion is not only desirable but unavoidable.

Words are the tools of a writer's trade and words are how we interact online, and so every blog entry, every message board post, every half-assed witticism on facebook or myspace is an opportunity for potential readers to judge how well writers use those tools.

Bottom line - it's all self-promotion, whether we want it to be or not (except for reviewers, of course, who can depend on the self-interest of others to promote their work for them).

Even those who deplore such things, if they do so online, are indulging in what they claim to abhor, their every written thought on the subject pregnant with a subtext of 'buy me, because I'm better than those pimps, I can let my work speak for itself'.

By saying this I don't mean to impugn or question anybody's motives, only to argue that for writers self-promotion in one way or another is an inevitable by-product of interacting online in the same way that carbon dioxide is a by-product of breathing.

Of course you can over egg the pudding and have it all go wrong. We can all think of people who've got in our face so much that they've blown any chance they might have had of making a sale, and that's not just a phenomenon of the internet. The hard sell is seldom a good idea.

And the other mistake that I think writers make with regard to the internet is to confuse its potential for reaching a wide audience with the reality of competing in an arena where everybody is vying for attention. Blogging etc, with pimpage as a by-product, sounds good in theory, but unless you're prepared to put in the effort of somebody like, say, John Scalzi, and have a similar talent for capturing an audience, then the chances are that you won't achieve anything significant as far as self-promotion goes, so my advice (not that you were asking) is to enjoy interacting online for its own worth rather than any fringe benefits per se.

The danger is that in fixating on the internet as a means of promotion, writers forget and overlook more traditional methods, and with that comment I'm at last getting to the real point of this post, as well as coming over slightly maudlin and feeling sorry for myself.

I'm the newshound for a magazine called Black Static. You may have heard of it. It comes out every two months and is allegedly one of the best horror magazines in the world. And unless your name is John Scalzi, it probably gets seen by way more people than your blog, facebook, myspace, whatever.

In each issue of Black Static there's a couple of pages at the front called White Noise, in which we publish horror news of interest to our readers, with a bias towards the news of Black Static contributors (but others are included if space permits). And there's an address - whitenoise@ttapress.com - to which news can be sent.

It's free advertising in one of the world's leading horror publications, and you'd think writers and publishers would jump at it, but the reality is I'm lucky if I get sent three or four items per issue. We've published the work of over eighty writers, but from memory only four have ever sent me anything. Invariably I end up haring round the internet at the last minute and scouring Amazon's lists of coming releases to find something to fill up the space with.

From my point of view then, the problem is not that writers do self-promotion, but that most of them are such crap at it.

So, if you're a writer, next time you post something to your blog or whatever, why not take a minute to also copy and paste it into an email to whitenoise@ttapress.com ? Space is limited and we have standards, so I don't promise to use it, but the odds of me doing so are much better than if I never hear about it at all.

Our next issue is due out mid-April, which means I'm particularly interested in stuff - book and film deals/releases, signings etc - happening between then and mid-June.

You are writers!

Let me hear you roar!