Author: Scott William Carter

The Best Advice I’ve Gotten on Promotion Was From a Comedian

Award-winning writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been running a great series on promotion for writers (which I highly recommend you read, whether you’re a writer or just someone who’s interested in how writers find readers), and it got me thinking about the best advice I’ve ever gotten about how to find an audience.  It was this:

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

It was actually from Steve Martin, a comedian.  Well, the truth is, he’s actually a writer, too, as most good comedians are. Martin may have said this before, but I first heard him say it in an interview with Charlie Rose, when he was asked what he tells people when they want advice on how to break into show business.

“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ . . . but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you … If somebody’s thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ people are going to come to you.”

Of course, what’s good is somewhat subjective, so in the end only you can be the judge of what’s good.  But instead of thinking about how to use Facebook to promote your book, how to reach readers through Twitter, or, God forbid, how to build your “author platform,” bet on being good.  Do what Steve Martin did.  Ask yourself why others succeed?  Study their work.  Break it down.  Then apply what you learned to your own work and do something new and innovative in your own way.

There’s no secret sauce, no magic bullets.  It’s not about who you know.  You don’t need anyone’s permission.  Yes, luck plays a part, as it does in all things in life, but if you’re really good — and I’m talking about being so good that people can’t help but notice — luck will find you.

Yes, that’s the harder path, but it’s also a lot more fun.

Not Every Moment of Your Life Must Be Recorded

Sherry Turkle has a nice piece in The New York Times about the dangers of “The Documented Life” that fits right into some of my thinking about the need to live more of a plugged/unplugged life.  Here’s a key passage:

“Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.

We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.”

Except for a strange little aside that perpetuates the myth that President Obama was being rude taking a “selfie” at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, it’s well worth reading the whole thing.

From the Video Archives: Seth Godin on Being Remarkable

“Being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do.”

The above quote is probably the most controversial thing Seth Godin said in the video, and you really have to watch it to understand the context.  The basic gist is that it’s not enough to be good in the modern world if you want your ideas to spread; you have to be good in an interesting and provocative way, creating something “worth remarking about.”  Applying this to writing and publishing, the takeaway is that you need to take risks, but it’s not risks with the marketing (although that can certainly play a part).  It’s risks in what you write.  Yes, you have to write well, write with heart, and put out something of quality, but if you’re just chasing a trend because it’s selling well (i.e. writing vampire romances because that seems to be hot), you’re actually making the riskier bet in the long run.

Conversations with Poe: The Plugged-Unplugged Life

Me: I have a little problem.

Poe: Oh?

Me: This is the third morning in a row that someone left a message taped to my monitor in my home office that reads, ‘Get an Internet connection in here or the bunny gets it.’  You wouldn’t know who did that, would you?

Poe:  Hmm.  That is a perplexing mystery.

Me: Because first off, I don’t have a bunny.

Poe: Perhaps it was meant in a metaphorical sense.

Me: Yeah, still trying to parse that one.  And second off, I’m never going to have an Internet connection in my home office.

Poe: And why is that?  As a completely impartial observer in this, one who spends a lot of time in your office with no connection to the outside world, I’m just curious.

Me: That’s just it.  While there’s obviously great value in being connected, there’s also value in being disconnected.  I’m a big believer that creativity and innovation need both solitude and stimulation to really thrive.  It’s like taking a breath.  Stimulation is taking in the breath.  Solitude is letting it out.  Stimulation can come from lots of sources, but the Internet is obviously a big one.  It’s also the most powerful tool for communication and collaboration the world has ever known.  But you couldn’t design a more perfect device for distraction.

In fact, I’ve taken it much farther lately.  I’ve been doing my best to live what I call a plugged-unplugged life.  Since I spend so much time online in my work at Western Oregon University — where I’m just about as plugged-in as someone can be — I live almost completely unplugged when at home.  No Internet at all.  Incidentally, it’s also why I don’t have a comment section or forum on my blog.  I have nothing against comment sections on blogs.  But maintaining a viable comment section, one worth doing and doing well, takes time. And with time in such short supply these days, and because I’m trying to maintain this healthier plugged/unplugged approach to modern life, I need to be able to pop in and out of the information stream a little more judiciously than I’ve done in the past.

Plus there’s now so many ways for people to interact and connect, that it hardly seems necessary to have a comment section on a blog.  If something I’ve posted here provokes a strong reaction from someone, and they want to write something in response that gets more public exposure, well, they can post it to their own site or blog.  That’s the best kind of dialog, after all!

Poe: How is that working?

Me: It’s wonderful, though it’s also challenging.  Modern life makes it pretty hard to let go of the Internet completely, and I’m not the only person in the household, so it’s not entirely my call, but I don’t check email, don’t surf the Web, don’t do social media — all of that is done when not at home.  If it’s personal, and not appropriate to do on the university’s dime, I just squeeze it in during my lunch hour or on the smart phone when away from home.  I use my smart phone too much for all kinds of legitimate life-improving things to completely get rid of it, which is part of the challenge, but when I’m in the house, I just leave it by my bedside.  Just doing that one thing rather than carrying it with me everywhere has really helped.

It’s a strategy I’d recommend to lots of people.  Not just writers.  Anyone who feels like being so tethered to the Great and Powerful Hive Mind is not always healthy.

Poe: So really no Internet connection in here, eh?

Me: I’m afraid you’ll have to make do reading all those trashy books on my bookshelves — the ones you claim you would never read but are always mysteriously in the wrong order.

Poe: Hmm.  Another perplexing mystery.