The Not-so-Fine Art of Self-Promotion.

　
Today, fellow darklings, I thought I’d talk about a subject of considerable importance to the Forgotten Writer, though it concerns an activity I once considered beneath the serious writer’s contempt:  the promotion of  one’s own work. I suppose I picked up this elitist attitude from writers of the fifties like J.D. Salinger (one of my early gods), who was famously adverse to interviews and other forms of publicity–though it is not known that he disdained the royalty checks his fame brought in. Ernest Hemingway (another god of my youth) once said that a writer could "stoop no lower" than to read his own work aloud for an audience of paying customers. And one of my revered teachers at Stanford told me he routinely turned down publicity appearances with the curt dismissal, "I don’t do that sort of thing."

The view of art animating such contempt implies that a work of art must stand or fall on its own merits, and that anything its author says can only falsify and cheapen whatever one has accomplished. Moreover, it was felt, writers had better things to do with their time than shill their own books; they should be writing more books capable of speaking for themselves. There may even be a notion that history, not momentary popularity, willd determine a literary work’s true value. We all knew of books that had been famous ten or twenty years ago and were now justly forgotten. We also had our list of sacred texts that had slumbered for decades in the budget bins of used book stores and were now considered classics. "What about Moby-Dick?" we’d say. "What about the early Faulkner?"

My attitude began to change when I published my first novel–which, of course, wasn’t done without a great deal of help from other people. In a future blog I intend to write about the champions every young writer needs in order to get her work before the public.   But that’s not today’s topic. Today’s topic is how, having published a novel, most writers would like, not just a "fit audience, though few," but an audience extending to the unwashed masses. After all, having found a publisher who is kind enough to put your words in print, you want that noble fellow and his firm to be suitably rewarded. Besides, the fate of your next book may depend the sales record of your last. So just like that, one tosses aside the scruples of a Hemingway or a Salinger, shrugs off the cloak of elitism, and becomes a huckster. At least that’s what I did. Flattered by all the requests I was getting, and assured by early reviews that the book really was pretty good, I began accepting interviews, speaking engagements, bookstore signings, whatever the literary world wanted to throw at me. Often I was scared, sometimes humiliated, rarely gratified. Pimping one’s book was, in those days, a tough way to make a small amount of money.

I remember my first signing at a Palo Alto bookshop in a busy shopping center. I sat at a table with a stack of Competitors in front of me, pen in hand, ready to chat up anyone who stopped to look or buy. There were people in the store, but no one came near my table. I began to feel a bit in the way, like an old sofa in a snazzy new apartment. Some people came in the door, saw me there, and scurried out again. Snubbed! I wanted to crawl under my table and hide. Eventually a couple of my profs and classmates wandered in. The profs all dutifully bought a copy of the book; the classmates mostly grabbed some of the free cookies, gulped down some punch, congratulated me, and left. I don’t think I diminished that pile of books by more than six or eight copies. At three ninety-five a book, royalties at three percent a copy, that came to approximately three dollars and nineteen cents for three harrowing hours in the store. Not what you’d call a great pay-off.

Then there was the radio interview I did at a crowded San Francisco restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf.  The interviewer, a locally famous radio personality, was ensconced at a round table in the corner, surrounded by his producer, technicians, equipment, and guests. We all got a ten-minute slot between ads and patter, our words masked by the background noise of the hectic restaurant. "So how’d you come to write about a shoe store, Tom?" the personality asked me. "Well, I used to work in one when I was an undergraduate," I told him. "So you used to work in one," the personality said. "That’s great. So what are some the dirty secrets of the biz, Tom? What are some things customers ought to know when they walk in that store?"

I’m not sure how I answered that question, but I could’ve told the interviewer that shoe salesmen were people–sometimes suffering people--who had real lives and interesting stories of their own. But I wasn’t quick enough to say that. Most likely, I mumbled something about the pressure we were under to sell shoe polish and purses. What we called "Up-fronts." "Up-fronts!" the personality said. "Gotta watch out for those up-fronts, folks. They’ll get you every time. Now our next guest . . ."   A week later I got a check in the mail for $75 and felt I’d earned every cent of it, even thought I’m pretty sure I hadn’t given the show a full ten-minute segment.

Once I joined the faculty of a Midwestern state university, I had a captive audience, though at first I declined to take advantage of it, regressing to my earlier mode of haughty contempt for self-promotion. It was the mid-sixties and poetry readings were big at our school, a Friday night occasion for kids in psychedelic attire, reefers at the ready, hints of revolution wafting through the air along with puffs of pot smoke. Our poets reveled in the attention they were almost getting; our fiction writers (me and one other guy) stayed away.

But times change, and so do the attitudes they engender. My second novel proved much harder to sell than my first. That was partly because I’d lost my original champion when I left graduate school, and partly because, despite its good reviews and my feeble attempts at promotion, The Competitor hadn’t sold especially well. My old editor departed for greener pastures. My new editor was a kind lady but lacked the older guy’s swat. Then there was that lawsuit, which cost Scribner’s a bit of money (who would’ve thought that shoe salesmen, of all people, would read a book?). But mostly it was because my second novel just wasn’t very good--too hastily written, too clumsily conceived.

You always have to take the quality of the work into account, and sometimes, when you find you can't publish something you wrote, it’s not because the world’s against you. It’s much more likely that the book or story stinks. Even good writers, I was to learn, have a few bad books in them. Of course if you’re like me, you may not be able to tell your good stuff from the bad stuff until it’s too late--until you’ve shown the lousy manuscript to enough agents and editors to besmirch your reputation. Then, when you do, in the natural course of things, write another good book, you have to work extra hard to get someone interested in it.

So it goes for us "mid-list" writers who never give up and keep on writing despite diminishing returns. When my second novel came out in 1974, the air had cleared a bit in the rooms where poetry was read and I agreed to join my colleagues by reading from my new book. Since I had written a novel about rebellious teenagers (The Adventures of A Young Outlaw), full of sex and violence, obscenity and profanity, with a wry, satiric tone appropriate to the times, the kids loved it. Their enthusiastic reception gave me a fatal taste for applause. The book, however, came out to mediocre reviews. Younger readers (those under thirty, attuned to the times) tended to understand what I’d tried to do. Older readers (especially most reviewers) were shocked and appalled. The novel died an early, ignominious death, but not before it gave me some wonderful moments of reader-adulation. "Finding the right audience" thus became the mantra I lived with.

But that is easier said than done, since generations come and go, taste and styles change accordingly, and the writer himself keeps growing older and wiser, or maybe just foolish in different ways. In any case, I no longer wanted to write about adolescent rebellion. Having been a full-fledged academic for well over ten years, I wanted to write something a little more highbrow; I wanted to show off my erudition. I also wanted to write about England, where I'd spent a magical year in my impressionable youth.  And so in due course (after two or three more failed attempts) I produced a novel called Celestial Chess, which is about a haunted manuscript in the library of a Cambridge college.  The narrator is an ironic, cynical American scholar who finds his life and outlook changed by his research into a remarkable thirteenth-century poem by one Geoffrey Gervaise, a mad monk who imagines he is playing chess with the devil. Alternating chapters take us back to the thirteenth century to glimpse parts of Gervaise’s tragic story. The intervening chapters, set in contemporary England, employ a more comic tone. Even if I say so myself, the novel is a fairly intricate and elegant piece of sustained irony, and this time I was not disappointed by its reception. Critics tended, on the whole, to like its mixture of modes, readers enjoyed the story, and I got many fan letters from readers young and old.

Once again I plunged myself into the readings, autograph parties, interviews, and speaking engagements, usually going no further afield than the twin nexus of the Wisconsin’s literary community, Madison and Milwaukee. I suppose I was a local celebrity for, oh, all of six or seven months. Then the wave receded and I was left on the shore, straining to come up with a novel that might do as well. The problem, I soon realized, was that I was now type-cast as a writer of fantasy, which wasn’t what I’d set out to do at all. I had little interest in dungeons and dragons, witchcraft and sorcery. What I’d been trying for was a witty, philosophical parable in the manner of Iris Murdoch, one of my current favorites. But why wasn’t anyone able to see that?

You see, attempts at self-promotion and self-definition don’t really help readers to see your work more clearly.   Or maybe the readers see what’s really there, and you are the one with illusions. In any case, my career floundered for another ten years, was sidetracked by various administrative tasks (always a great temptation for the writer in distress), and I didn’t make it back into print again until 1989, with a pseudo spy-thriller called The Giant’s Shadow.   I say "pseudo," because once again the generic husk of the novel was, to my mind, a mere convenience. It’s heart was once again pure academic psycho-drama. A middle-aged scholar, as grim and gray as any imagined by Graham Greene, finds himself recruited, while on a sabbatical in Germany, by the CIA, who want the scholar’s help in smuggling his old friend, a radical poet, out of the Soviet Union. Whatever the novel’s merits (and there were many, I think), my timing was atrocious. Barely a month or two later, John LeCarre would upstage me with The Russia House, and little more than a year after that, the Reunification of Germany and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union would render the Cold War spy novel effectively obsolete.

So much for tapping the popular pulse. Though my Giant did sneak off with at least one prize–a selection by the Reader’s Digest Book Club, which, as embarrassing as it might be for an academic, did yield a satisfyingly large paycheck. And it came, I assure you, with absolutely no promotional efforts on my part.  My cagey old editor had simply milked a connection and the deal was done. The Giant now lives on in a single volume with three other condensed novels that will never leave the bins of used book shops.

We now fast-forward to the 21^st century, mostly because nothing much of importance happened to me or my work during the nineties. Oh yes, I wrote, but to no avail. Novels I believed in, novels I considered at the time my best work ever, were routinely declined by polite and often apologetic editors. "This is exactly the kind of novel I like to read," one such editor wrote me, "but not, unfortunately, the kind I can afford to publish any more." Aside from admiring this fellow’s honesty, one can only wonder at the state the literary world has reached when editors must forego books they like for books they have no real interest in. But times, as I think I’ve said before, do change, and it is now the task of the Forgotten Writer who wishes to leave his darkling plain to determine how he can best promote, or hucksterize, his novels in the Brave New World of . . . you guessed it, the internet.

But I see this has become a much deeper subject than I anticipated when I first set out to chart its waters. We will need at least two installments to fathom all that lies below us and around us. And so I will put off for another blog my next installment, in which the resourceful old dog tries to learn from his younger, more nimble competitors, and sets out to avail himself of the opportunities now available to writers desperate enough to seize them. In a phrase, we shall go a-waltzing Matilda on the cybernetic dance floor.

Until then, fellow darklings, don’t forget that your comments and indeed even your own stories are welcome in this space, and if you don’t interrupt me soon I may eventually run out of gas.

Yours, Sinbad