I am in awe.

February 1, 2013 at 3:09 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

This is amazing and coalesces all of my mixed feelings about the post below.  I like the idea of a crowd-sourced, pay-it-forward means of discovering authors I might not have heard of otherwise.  And I sincerely love the writers I linked to, and was linked to by — I’m still negotiating how to effectively toggle between “wannabee author myself” and “terribly sincere fan.”  But for blogging authors, TNBT is also blatant self-promotion, and self-promotion always feels a bit painful and awkward in its cringing desperation (at least it does to me…I feel like a dog asked to tap-dance).  Incisive, gently critical whimsy is the best of all possible responses.  Thank you for this, Helena.

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  1. I’m so glad you enjoyed it! Much more fun to be silly and make stuff up–I think if I’d had a real project I would’ve had a much harder time with it. :)

    Comment by Hel— February 1, 2013 #

  2. I’ve never understood the horror of self-promotion on one’s blog. Unlike, say, Twitter or Facebook, a blog is the least intrusive of all online communication channels. It’s a place that your readers have to choose to visit. Too many self-promoting tweets disrupt other peoples’ feeds (although, I have to say, self-promoting tweets and facebook statuses don’t bother me in the slightest), but self-promoting blog posts disrupt nothing.

    Comment by R. H. Kanakia— February 1, 2013 #

  3. Rahul, I suppose this’ll have to go in a longer post, because it deserves a longer conversation. Tim argued something similar over on his blog. I need to a think a bit more about whyfor the gut-level horror, but I’ll post something soon. And thank you for sharing your thoughts.

    Comment by sunscald— February 2, 2013 #

  4. I completely understand the gut-level horror. I have a hard time posting anything on my blog unless it adds intrinsically valuable information. I’ve recently started making posts for story notes as a roundabout way of announcing when a story comes out, but at least in that case I’m providing the secret decoder ring for understanding the story (something my stories often need).

    The blogs I tend to read are the ones that are interesting, funny, or by writers I *really* like. In the latter case, I love seeing when they’ve recently sold a story or a novel or whatever because I want to go read those things. So while I’m happy when *they* self-promote, I can’t justify it on my end because I don’t think of myself as falling into that category. Thus the only way I can generate readers for my blog is by posting original creative content. Any post which self-promotes runs the risk of alienating potential readers (no one subscribes to a blog where the author just talks about herself all day) and thus I avoid it.

    That’s why I like memes like this though I often have a hard time participating–it gives people a chance to talk about themselves and their work but in such a way that it’s not gratuitous self-love.

    In other words, Rahul may be as cool as a cucumber about many things, but I’m with you, Brooke :)

    Comment by Hel— February 2, 2013 #


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