I knew a guy once, this is going back maybe ten years ago, maybe fifteen . . . anyway, he had a band, and he would use email to let us all know when his band was playing. I’m not talking about an occasional email; I’m talking about three or four emails each week giving us all date and time and location.
All well and good, I guess, although a bit overboard, but I would have persisted through that onslaught except for the fact that he never talked about anything else, and he certainly never gave a rat’s butt about those of us who had to read his damned emails. Not once do I remember him asking how I was doing, or how my family was . . . it was just the same message hammered home day in and day out.
I never did go listen to his band. There was no way in hell I was going to support him when he hadn’t taken the time to treat me like a friend he cared about.
I try to remember that now when I’m in writing/marketing mode. There is more to life than my writing career. There are far more important things in the world than some new book I’ve written, or some new article I’ve penned.
The audience for my writing is composed of real people. They have lives. They do not need me to beat them over the head with advertising, day in and day out. They are people I actually care about, and I refuse to dip so low as to become nothing more than a poor facsimile of a cheap commercial. You all know I’m a writer. I don’t need to continually announce that to the world. Read my books, don’t read my books, it really makes no difference to me.
What is important to me are relationships, and I refuse to jeopardize those relationships in order to sell one copy of my work. I just won’t do it.
The Gospel According To Bill
“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”
Billybuc
Artistry With Words 