Scary Stories: Horror Narrative (about publicity) and Fears (of Failure)
- At October 24, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
It’s almost Halloween, and that means it’s time for some scary stories!
If you picked up this latest issue of Poets & Writers, the one with the sunny visage of Ms. Elizabeth Gilbert on the cover, you may run across an article that is kind of a horror story: a young writer spends $10,000, her entire advance, on the publicity services of two independent book publicists who basically take her money and do nothing. She does not name these two publicists, which might have been a public service, unfortunately. (There is also a somewhat flimsy rebuttal by a publicist, who doesn’t actually address the issue of dishonest publicists, but makes a case that “our job is hard.” Which, no doubt, it is. But it doesn’t justify charging someone $5K and never contacting them again!)
Now some people might have limited sympathy for the writer who spent her money thus. After all, she explains that she did vet them but spending that kind of money on publicity services seems at best very optimistic…I felt really racy/crazy spending $99 on the “Premium” package at YouDoPR for my last book and felt I got a much better deal than this woman in the article did! (Also, that “Everyday Book Marketing” book by Midge Raymond has plenty of good tips for much less than 10K.) Of course, I’m a poet and we get limited publicity no matter how much money we might throw at the problem, because so few media outlets are interested in poetry in the first place. But it was interesting to think about how many writers might unwittingly be throwing money after this kind of problem (a commenter on Facebook pointed out a Goodreads banner ad runs $5K!!!) I mean, I don’t know how many small press writers are making upwards of 10K on their royalties in the first place to kind of have this money to play with, but yikes!
My other story has to do with fears. Specifically, my fears of failure (among other fears.) A few posts ago, I mentioned I have been “looking for a sign” – in vain, I must admit – in the days after that post, I received three regular rejections and a grant “no.” So is that my sign that I should quit, that I should give up writing?
Those of you who remember this post (What to do when life rains on your parade) will know that I have been dealing with some straight up frightening health news – specifically, about developing neural lesions, which threaten things like motor skills, memory, and the like. It’s been a dark time for me, not just physically but mentally and emotionally, worrying that dropping a pumpkin on my foot at the grocery store is a sign of worsening neural problems, or that being unable to place a face with a name (which happened a couple of times at Geek Girl Con) is a sign my ability to place faces with names at all might be disappearing.
What specifically am I hoping for, these days, as a forty-year old with a few poetry books to my name, and not much else? I have always been one of those annoying types who fears failure – what if I never become a success at what I want to do, I worried when I was 22 (although then, I was not quite as sure what I wanted to do – like Barbie, I thought I could be anything – President! Astronaut! Figure Skater!) Now, I may be looking at a compressed time frame – with the time and ability I have left, what can I realistically hope for? I want to be realistic. Maybe poetry is not a good game for realists. What can I expect with my next book? Obviously I have more realistic, less ambitious goals than I did when I was younger. But I can still hope for good things to come out of the blue. Maybe my “sign” just hasn’t come yet.