Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

MELANIE & STEVE TEM: SELLING YOURSELF

Steve:

 

To be perfectly frank, the very phrase puts knots in my stomach.  No wonder I’m not terribly talented at it.  Part of it’s the way I was raised–anything even hinting at a brag was frowned upon.  My discomfort multiplies, however, due to the issue of persona.  We all have them, a face we present to the world.  (Our avatar, in techno-geek terms.)  The healthy thing, I suppose, is to keep it as close to your “real” self as possible. 

 

Writers have a particularly complicated relationship to persona, what with narrative voice, characters who may or may not speak for you (or perhaps speak for some isolated aspect of you), and the “professional face” writers wear for personal appearances.  (And don’t get me started on “on line” personae–that entire realm is electronic schizophrenia.)  Many writers, if you get to know them personally, are pretty close to that public face.  Some can be startlingly different.

 

I’m a very shy person, always have been, as far back as when I learned to talk (or refused to talk).  It’s gotten better over the years, but there’s a shy core to me which appears to be rock-solid, unshakable.  I genuinely like people, and am very interested in hearing what most of them have to say.  That’s me in the corner: nodding, smiling, and always listening.  So to conduct myself publicly as a writer, I pretend I’m not shy.  It seems illogical, but it has worked for me.   I pretend I’m not shy, so that I can give speeches, appear on panels, and translate the interest I have in readers into the ability to actually talk to them.

 

But “selling yourself”?  It’s the persona you’re usually selling–that’s what you have ready access to.  Therein lies much of my discomfort. 

 

But the work, on the other hand, does need to be sold.  It needs to get the best exposure possible, the best (or at least most appropriate) audience, if it’s to realize its full potential.  I sincerely believe that there is an aspect to story which goes beyond personal authorship, a realm in which we are both midwife and steward to the stories we tell.  This isn’t to say that we aren’t personally responsible for them, or that they could arrive into this world without us.  One of the things I tell newer writers who may be unsure of their abilities is that without them, their stories, the unique tales which are theirs to tell, will never be heard in this world.  So it is their job to become good enough to tell those tales adequately.  And then to do their best to get those stories read.

 

Melanie and I currently have a book out we very much believe in, THE MAN ON THE CEILING (Wizards Discoveries).  We have solo novels coming out next year: Melanie’s THE YELLOW WOOD in April and my DEADFALL HOTEL in November (both Wizards Discoveries), and a collaborative collection also out in November, IN CONCERT (Centipede Press).  We have pledged to do a better job at promoting these projects than we have in the past. 

 

To that end we attended a very good PR panel at World Horror this year, learning much about that strange new creature the book trailer.  And at BEA this year we were introduced to the concept of marketing via social networks: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, etc.  A very strange thing has happened to book marketing since the last time we had books out–it’s mostly gone online.  We have a lot to learn.  For me, it’s really an issue of finding new creative projects we can do as collateral for these books (as a model I love the extras you get on DVDs, for example), projects that allow us to connect to people, that we find fulfilling in their own right, not just as PR activities. 

 

So in the past few months you may have seen essays by us on the Powell’s website, or on Backstory, a podcast up on the Odyssey Workshop site, and I’ve recently made a Facebook page, and we’ll have MySpace pages eventually for both of us.  Melanie’s now blogging on our website at www.m-s-tem.com, and I’m trying to figure out how to create a booktrailer that doesn’t look like an advance preview of a B movie.  And maybe for DEADFALL HOTEL there will be hotel notepads, or room service menus, oh wow!  We may decide some of these activities just aren’t us, but others are likely to become a regular thing.  Doing what’s fun and comfortable, and only what’s fun and comfortable–that’s my answer to selling myself.

 

Melanie:

 

My shyness takes a form different than Steve’s.  Public speaking, teaching, oral storytelling–all these come easy.  Although I don’t have a lot of patience for small talk–life’s too short!–I love having real conversations with new people as well as old friends, and discovering connections pleases me.

 

Sometimes I’m self-conscious in groups of people I don’t know well, largely because my visual limitations make it all too possible that I’ll blunder–fail to recognize someone I should, mis-identify someone and introduce her/him to someone else by the wrong name, take the arm of a total stranger.    Believe me, all that and more has happened.

 

But my shyness about this “Selling Yourself” thing doesn’t come from that.  It comes from the difficulty I have believing that anyone would be interested in, say, what I write in a blog.  It isn’t that I’m uncomfortable about disclosing personal information; I can control that.  It’s that I have trouble thinking of anything to post that doesn’t seem silly and self-indulgent to me.  I don’t get the concept.  (I’m feeling some of that kind of shyness here and now–are you sure you’re interested in reading this?) 

 

But the work does indeed need to be sold.  That may be self-indulgent, too, or self-aggrandizing, but I’m not shy about it.  Once someone came up to me at a convention in London to tell me that my book Revenant had changed her life.  Someone else just wrote what a beautiful book The Deceiver is–a book I am proud of that just sort of sank without a sound.  People are telling us that The Man on the Ceiling helps them think about what it means to be human, makes them feel less alone in the world, inspires them to be better writers and better people.  I can’t tell you what an honor it is to know that something I’ve created, or helped to create, has touched people like that.

 

So, in order to “get the stories read,” as Steve puts it, I’m determined to learn about online “selling yourself”–probably not the newest frontier by now, but very new to me.  I think I’d like a LinkedIn page.  I’ll keep blogging, especially if you help me out and say something back!

 

Related posts:

1. Melanie Tem & Steve Rasnic Tem
2. Steve & Melanie Tem: THE GENRE THING
3. Melanie & Steve Tem: THE TYRANNY OF THE ORIGINAL IDEA
4. Steve & Melanie Tem: SHOCKING READS
5. Steve and Melanie Tem: BURIED IN PAPER

Share on Twitter

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.