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I wouldn’t say that I have a love-hate relationship with self-promotion regarding my writing – it’s much more like a hate-hate relationship. Or at best, a meh-hate relationship. I look at facebook and twitter and think, what in the world would it get me to post “Look at me! Read my book!” all the time when I find it so annoying when other people do it? But one thing I love is to share knowledge and enthusiasm, so I’m overjoyed if I can find a way to casually mention my book in the context of doing that.
My social circles include a higher-that-typical proportion of teachers and librarians. This is a Good Thing for a writer. When a friend of mine who teaches English and writing to high school and community college students in San Jose asked if I’d be willing to talk to her students about writing, I jumped at the chance. She even made Daughter of Mystery assigned reading for one of the classes, which gave me the thrill of seeing my Amazon.com listing announce that people who bought my book also bought books by Sherman Alexie, Michael Crichton, and Chaz Brenchley.
So yesterday I drove down to the South Bay to do a reading and answer questions about writing in general and my writing process in particular. I started off with an excerpt from the unpublished prequel “Three Nights at the Opera” (and had promotional copies left over from GCLS to give away so they could read the whole story) and then plunged in to the Q&A. Well, “plunged” may not be correct, it was more like a tentative wading in at first, but the students warmed up quickly and there were never any awkward silences. (I’m sure it helped that one of the classes had to write essays about some aspect of Daughter of Mystery so they came primed with questions related to the assignment.)
We covered the writing process (“Do you always write in a particular place?”), how my own experiences and background informed my writing (very tentatively, “This may be a personal question, but is there anything in your own background that led you to write about a romance between two women?”), themes in the books (“Social restrictions and privilege seem to be important to your characters…”), the historic setting (“So religion is a Big Deal in your story, how do your characters integrate their religious beliefs and their sexuality?”) the mechanics of writing alternate worlds (“I was noticing how the characters names were sort of like real names, but not quite …”), and issues around publishing (“Did writing a lesbian-themed book cause you any problems in getting published?”). The students were engaged, informed, curious, and excited. It was a fabulous evening.
A couple of highlights: The student who had started the term saying, “A lesbian romance? Really? We have to read this?” said he hoped he’d win the drawing for a copy of the book because his own was getting rather tattered. (He also had enough questions that I had to politely ask him to wait a couple times so that other students could have a turn.) The student who started off by saying, “I don’t read books much…” who concluded with, “…reading your book was just like watching a movie!” I think he was the same one who came up at the end to ask what else I had published that he could look for.
I ended with a second reading (they voted for the bit from the opening of The Mystic Marriage rather than something from Daughter of Mystery) a few final questions, and then the drawing for the book give-away. Nowhere in there did I ever have to say, “Hey, look at me! Buy my book!” But I walked away with some new hard-core fans who likely would never be considered part of my “target audience” in the ordinary run of things. When my novel came out, one of the things I promised myself was that I’d always do my best to say “yes” to any sort of meet-the-public book events, even if only a couple people showed up. Last night I had well over 20 people in the audience and even beyond numbers it was well worth the experience. Fortunately, there are new classes every term and I might just get invited again….
My social circles include a higher-that-typical proportion of teachers and librarians. This is a Good Thing for a writer. When a friend of mine who teaches English and writing to high school and community college students in San Jose asked if I’d be willing to talk to her students about writing, I jumped at the chance. She even made Daughter of Mystery assigned reading for one of the classes, which gave me the thrill of seeing my Amazon.com listing announce that people who bought my book also bought books by Sherman Alexie, Michael Crichton, and Chaz Brenchley.
So yesterday I drove down to the South Bay to do a reading and answer questions about writing in general and my writing process in particular. I started off with an excerpt from the unpublished prequel “Three Nights at the Opera” (and had promotional copies left over from GCLS to give away so they could read the whole story) and then plunged in to the Q&A. Well, “plunged” may not be correct, it was more like a tentative wading in at first, but the students warmed up quickly and there were never any awkward silences. (I’m sure it helped that one of the classes had to write essays about some aspect of Daughter of Mystery so they came primed with questions related to the assignment.)
We covered the writing process (“Do you always write in a particular place?”), how my own experiences and background informed my writing (very tentatively, “This may be a personal question, but is there anything in your own background that led you to write about a romance between two women?”), themes in the books (“Social restrictions and privilege seem to be important to your characters…”), the historic setting (“So religion is a Big Deal in your story, how do your characters integrate their religious beliefs and their sexuality?”) the mechanics of writing alternate worlds (“I was noticing how the characters names were sort of like real names, but not quite …”), and issues around publishing (“Did writing a lesbian-themed book cause you any problems in getting published?”). The students were engaged, informed, curious, and excited. It was a fabulous evening.
A couple of highlights: The student who had started the term saying, “A lesbian romance? Really? We have to read this?” said he hoped he’d win the drawing for a copy of the book because his own was getting rather tattered. (He also had enough questions that I had to politely ask him to wait a couple times so that other students could have a turn.) The student who started off by saying, “I don’t read books much…” who concluded with, “…reading your book was just like watching a movie!” I think he was the same one who came up at the end to ask what else I had published that he could look for.
I ended with a second reading (they voted for the bit from the opening of The Mystic Marriage rather than something from Daughter of Mystery) a few final questions, and then the drawing for the book give-away. Nowhere in there did I ever have to say, “Hey, look at me! Buy my book!” But I walked away with some new hard-core fans who likely would never be considered part of my “target audience” in the ordinary run of things. When my novel came out, one of the things I promised myself was that I’d always do my best to say “yes” to any sort of meet-the-public book events, even if only a couple people showed up. Last night I had well over 20 people in the audience and even beyond numbers it was well worth the experience. Fortunately, there are new classes every term and I might just get invited again….
