The Perils of Podcasts

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY BOOK HE-YAW, HE-YAW!

As you may or may not know I am likely the most incompetent self-promoter in the universe, which is problematic when you live in the age of the Shrunken Publishers who basically buy your novel and then then wave vaguely at the wide world and wish you the best of luck promoting your book. Part of my incompetence is in the planning, certainly; I have never claimed to be skilled at or even knowledgeable about marketing or PR, and I literally often have no idea what I should be doing. Or not doing. So far all I’ve figured out is

SHOULD BE DOING: Wearing pants.

SHOULD NOT BE DOING: Cursing at people on the assumption that they have not bought my book.

That’s it. But I’m also incompetent on the doing of self-promotion as well. For example, I recently did a promotional thing and broke all the rules of a good live reading and interview appearance: I was not prepared, I got flustered, I got out of breath and spent the entire forty-five minute experience sounding like someone had recently kicked me in the groin and about a second or so away from passing out.

Once you lose your breath under pressure, my experience tells me, you’re screwed, because you need a few minutes of calm in order to get yourself under control, which means a few minutes of dead silence while the person or audience listens to you breathing (and possibly sobbing, or glugging down booze, or possibly all of those things).

Which brings me to the lesson here: Be prepared? Sure, see how that works out for you. No, the lesson is to always be drunk when doing any sort of appearance.

I am not kidding. In the words of Professor Jennings from Animal House: “I’m not joking. This is my job!”

Now, I’m not talking about being ripped, staggering about shouting. I’ve done that, and it is not effective promotion. Back before The Electric Church was published, I was invited to a launch party by my publisher. I’d recently been asked to consider writing sequels to the book, and so I thought: Jebus, this is it, I will henceforth be rich and famous and adored by millions and able to leverage that adoration into an income the likes of which has never been seen! Or something to that effect. I’d already written about half the sequel, and was really full of myself. So I got really, really drunk and began shouting all sorts of things I now regret. I can’t forget this because The Duchess reminds me of it any time we go out to an industry party, with the implication that she will knock me unconscious if I try to repeat the performance.

No, what I mean is: Have a drink. Sit for twenty minutes with a scotch, or a glass of wine or a beer and relax. Have two! Then stop, because your goal is a nice buzz, not staggering around in Hulk Jeff mode as described above.

I’ll never get this particular appearance back, and maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt at the time (it was). My sole comfort is that no one is paying much attention to me anyway, so very few people will notice this when it goes live. Which means I might as well not wear pants and get horribly drunk anyway, right?