On the radio

This site is an open journal about publishing this book: The Given Self.

It’s probably been a while since I intimated a desire to give up on the marketing end of book publishing. I’ve nearly done it, but not quite.

Take, for instance, the idea that you will do radio interviews.

Now, for one thing, this is difficult for me because I don’t listen to the radio. Well, okay, every once in a while, I turn it on when I’m in the car. The fact that each time I do I end up scribbling myself a note about some great new song I’ve heard, doesn’t get me to do it more often. It doesn’t get me to learn how to put that song on my computer. I’ve got, at any given time, a half-dozen bank slips with song titles written on them in my purse though. Then, when I get a chance, I ask music savvy people, “Have you ever heard of Dan Wilson?” Usually, the answer is “Yes.” Then I’ll give them my guess at the name of the song I liked. With the click of a finger and a cell phone, blackberry, or whatever kind of device they have in their pocket, they’ll find the correct title. I’ll revise my note. That’s as far as it goes.

I never listen to talk radio. Occasionally I’ve listened to a Twins game. Basically, it seems to me that listening to the radio is something you do if you’re alone and bored. When I’m alone, I sigh in relief for the quiet. When I’m alone in my car, I’ve really gotten so I enjoy the freedom – maybe because my car broke down not long ago and I missed her while she was awaiting repairs. She’s a 2001 PT Cruiser. When I first got her, other Cruiser drivers would honk at me and people in grocery store parking lots would ask how I liked the car and want a peak inside the door. I’m sentimental about her, I guess. I named her Maurice after a song I still can’t ever remember the title of. But anyway, unless the drive is long or I’m feeling a restless energy, we ride in silence.

So you take this easy sounding thing – start with talk radio in your local area. You get on the internet and try to find out which talk radio shows aren’t right wing political diatribes. You delete those, and then you try to guess which ones might be interested in the arts. It’s a long and laborious process.

I found one woman I’m going to give a try though. Get this. There was this section – a kind of “get to know the host” question and answer section on the station’s website. When asked what her pet peeve was, this woman, host of Steele Talkin, said, “Cleanliness.” I thought – ‘She and I could get along.’

I told my mother- and sister-in-law about her while they were over working with Donny to make 9 dozen spinach and meat pies. They’d started before I got home from work. Donny hadn’t put the morning dishes away. They were going up and down the stairs to the basement where we’ve got more kitchen equipment than you can shake a stick at, including a warming oven (at least I think that’s what it’s called), and a big industrial mixer. To make spinach and meat pies, you mix the dough, set the dough in little balls, pound the dough after its risen, fill the dough, and then pinch it into little triangles and bake it. The table and counters were laden with bowls, flouer, pounding areas, pans, spoons, and big trays of beautiful, golden brown pies already done. The floor and steps were littered. Talking of this Jearlyn Steele and her pet peeve, I said, “I feel so much more comfortable in a house that isn’t perfect.”

Graciously, my mother- and sister-in-law agreed that I was comfortable with a mess. They started talking about people who’d wash your wooden spoon before you were done with it with great disdain.

Being peeved by cleanliness is a great conversation starter. I figure this woman knows what she’s doing on the radio. I figure if I can interest her in talking to me, we’ll have a great time. Check her out if you care to – she’s a fine looking woman besides – I mean you just know by looking at her that she’s got stuff to say:
http://www.wccoradio.com/pages/3457.php

But it still feels like a shot in the dark…even when you find someone who isn’t too keen on cleanliness. You might not think this bodes too well for me: one shot in the dark radio personality whom I feel I can approach with ease. Actually there are two more, both former patrons of our former coffee shop. One will remember me. The other will remember my daughters if I drop their names.

I just can’t see that it makes any more sense to send out massive inquiries to every radio program in town than it does to send the awful group e-mails. Call me old-fashioned, behind the times, or just plain contrary, but this is how I feel. And you can’t put out a book called The Given Self and go against yourself and your best instincts too much. It just won’t fly.

Being Who You Are Is Not A Luxury

About a week ago, I got the first e-mail from my publisher (O Books) since I submitted my final proofs. It was from the marketing department and addressed those with books coming out in December. Catherine noted that the group was generating a lot of activity on the database and that she was glad to see we were all busy with our marketing efforts. Of course, I immediately felt as if I was trailing behind all those other industrious authors. The e-mail also offered help, but then it suggested where you could find it on the database.

I heard from another author who is doing very well, too. Mick Quinn’s book, “The Uncommon Path,” came out in July. He’s been very busy since then. Nouk Sanchez suggested the contact, and Mick, like Nouk, responded right away to my request for ideas on marketing. He sent me a couple of thing he’d produced and said, “Use the database. It’s a goldmine of contacts.”

Okay, already.

Since receiving the marketing department’s e-mail encouragement I ignored the suggestion that I write a short, bulleted reply about my needs and wrote instead that I don’t know what my needs are and that the things I have done, and am supposed to enter on the database, have not worked out real well. But I also actually sent my first article to a source found on the database, and I was able to enter the fact that I contacted my local paper’s book reviewer and she’d agreed to look at the book. The woman from Barnes and Noble has played a little phone tag with me, but it sounds like a launch site has been found too. This is movement.

So enough, already. I just want to admit outright that I’m one of those people who can think there must be a better way even when all evidence points to the contrary. It’s served me at times in matters of spirit, and since it has, I always at least look at it as an option.

And finally, just to speak of something that feels of my heart, a subject that came up with my friend Mary today, I’ll just give myself a minute’s peace from marketing ideas and talk about that. Mary and I always talk from the heart, and today we were marveling over the idea that it may not only be what keeps us sane, but what keeps us healthy. You know how you get all pent up with your various anxieties? And then how, if you can talk to someone who understands, they practically vanish? This is a large part of heart talk in my book (which I was using as an expression but it is actually a part of “The Given Self” too).

It’s hard to express the difference between heart sharing and general griping, but I’d say you can tell the difference by the way you feel afterwards. If your load feels lightened, you’ve been doing some heart sharing. If you feel drained and irritable, you’ve been doing little more than sharing gripes. I wrote a post not long ago on my alternate blog http://spit-and-vinegar.blogspot.com about this very thing, and the radical idea that what we call complaints, could be seen as acceptance of the way we feel.

I’ve applied the same general principle to the issue of marketing, and I still feel that the matter of energy – what gives a person energy and what drains it – is a good gauge of when you’re following your heart. Now you might say that marketing has nothing to do with following your heart, but the thing is, how can it be any good if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, you’re just doing busy work. The article I submitted came from my heart. I didn’t have to enjoy researching where to submit it so much, but I did have to be in that good energy place to write it and to care enough about it to follow through with the submission.

One of the great lines from “A Course of Love” is “Being who you are is not a luxury.” It’s not for the chosen few who have nothing to gain or lose. It’s for all of us.

Some Kind of a Miracle

I’m beginning to see that if anyone ever begins to follow this blog, that it won’t be for publishing advice. This is as it should be.

It seems to me that there are about three tidbits of information that are actually valuable in life and the rest is all fluff. None of us need more information. And besides which, providing it is about the most boring thing in the world.

For instance, I could tell you how I finally took the calendar off my wall in my office (it still held a snow scene for being on the month of February), and turned it to September, and than had the month I needed turn to October before I wrote anything on it. What I wrote were simple words: research, mailing, database, article, follow-up. You can guess what they mean about as well as I can. They’re telling me to do one thing on Monday, the next on Tuesday and so on. Since I never make lists or use a calendar I can’t yet tell you if these words will actually help me feel empowered, organized, productive or least of all effective. I’m hitting that place where I’m not sure I care.

That’s the only place from which you write words on calendars as if they’ll save you. Remember this. It is important.

Working with inspiration or some spark of creativity is the only thing that’s ever going to make you feel like your work has meaning. Banish me from the Anne Lamott writers circle for saying so (at least if you’re one of those writers who has to be told to sit down and write everyday). If you’re not a writer who needs to discipline yourself to write (which heaven help me I can’t imagine for never having been one), then you do not need to be told to write through the boredom. You are going to write even if all you have to write is your lament about writing stupid words on a stupid calendar.

If you are able to get an agent, and wait a year (or three), and find a publisher who still does marketing for you and does it well, then by all means do so. Do not put yourself through this hell. If you are going to write impatiently and take the route of least resistance, then you will likely end up like me, and be forcing yourself with whatever kind of list or organizing tips you embrace, to do a bunch of stuff you don’t want to do. And if you’ve gone around a certain bend, one of those that come with spirit or age, the kind that says if you have to work that hard, put in that much effort, it is not the right way to go, then you might have to face that place where your dreams are not aligning with your level of ambition. It is why the vast majority people with successful careers establish themselves when they are young and still have the tolerance and the dexterity to jump through the hoops. I am not that young.

I did, however, have a couple of very moving things happen in the past few weeks, and they came of asking for help. It started in one area – a request for help with a family matter – and it felt so good to have asked for help that I asked again in another area – and then some help I hadn’t asked for at all arrived unexpectedly and I felt as if I’d opened the floodgates with the first asking, and as if this was all the universe had been waiting for.

This only just occurred to me, and so like the words on the calendar I can’t tell you it’s going to be the answer, but it suddenly dawned on me that these marketing things are all, at this point, a matter of asking: “Would you like to read my book? Hear what it’s about?”

You can call the powers that be “the universe,” or “God” or “your friends” or even “the media,” (depending on what kind of help you need, which square of a day that you’re standing on, or maybe the contents of your wallet), but I was reminded of the power of asking, the honesty that gets you to do it, and the benevolence that it can, at times unearth. And that reminder gave me just a glimmer of hope, of a non-ambitious, what do I have to lose attitude (to replace my sour one), that comes down to basically, “It can’t hurt to ask.”

Oh, you think it will and you can get yourself all tied up in knots about it, but in the end, when you finally try it, it’s not so bad at all. And in almost every instance, no matter what your query, the nature of the universe, and even specific portions of it, are kind of set up in such a way that need, and response to need, are part of the picture (i.e., book reviewers do need to review books). Whether you phrase it as “help” or not, the chances are there’s somebody out there (including book stores, therapists, and friends) who’s got a stake in saying, “Sure,” and might even feel good about being of service even if they’re not salivating to do so.

So I’ll do a little asking.

But I also want to say that the walls you hit, the places where it doesn’t seem worth it, or where your skills don’t line up with what you need to do, are legitimate places and can bear looking at. We each have limits. They’re not necessarily lazy, slacker, don’t want to work that hard places for which you need to feel small and guilty. For every writer who publishes there’s probably a thousand who write very well and don’t ever try, and another thousand who try once or twice and give up, and a thousand who feel bad about it and a thousand who don’t.

Writing is a beautiful art. It’s full of heart and soul. It makes you feel more vulnerable than a bird that weighs less than a quarter. You’re probably already sensitive by nature, and you’re probably, when it comes right down to it, not bequeathed with too many extroverted genes. You write because you love to write and you spend a lot of time alone, and quite frankly, you like it that way. Having a “successful” book has never been, in other words, the reason you write.

A “small” book is not a defeat. Just read Annie Dillard (“The Writing Life”) if you want backhanded encouragement, or to feel that any book, any good book at all, is some kind of a miracle.