A case of cold feet
The fear of self promotion
I released my first self published collection in late November. I started low level promotion of it in April 2024, telling the internet (mainly instagram) that I had decided to start pulling a collection together and I would share my story of how I was going about the process. This sharing of the story also was motivator for me to stay accountable to my own wish for a book of my poetry to exist. I truly enjoyed the process of sharing those snippets, especially when they got genuine interaction.
Just under 2 months later I have archived a lot of this. That doesn’t really matter, most of the stuff you put on line only has a genuine shelf live of a week. Like digital chip wrappers, except its little parts of your own life making the digital landfill. So archiving in itself isn’t a radical act. What it really represents to me is unseen and un-noticed, until I come over here and spill my digital guts all about it.
What really happened was something I didn’t expect. I got cold feet about self promotion. Precisely when I needed to forget my sense of shame, it intensified. I made up whole scenarios in my mind about what people might think. Which turned in to a string of negative self talk and led to further and further archiving more and more. I used to take glee in sharing poems and ideas on my instagram feed and that ‘method’ (of having no plan, no actual method, just getting stuff into the world and seeing what happened) all of a sudden felt ‘a bit much’.
When I first started sharing my writing I knew so much less than I do now about the process of writing and that naivety protected me from so much over thinking. I was just enjoying it and enjoying the connections it created. 6 years on, the over thinking has crept in and despite all the creative encouragers online ‘DO THE THING!’ ‘IT DOESN’T MATTER IF NO ONE LIKES IT’ ‘THE WORLD NEEDS YOUR ART’. You know the ones. I love them when I am in the right mood but right now, I see those kind of posts and think they don’t mean me. They must mean the artists who are all in. Full time , real and true. The truly creatively brave, living the visions. Not the artists who are still mainly working a day job and art gets the slithers of time they can find around that.
So, right now, I have a bit of self promotion and social media cold feet. This is probably also partly related to how horrible social media has become on a global scale. Add in a measure of how silly any poem on social media feels versus the sheer weight of the news over recent months, it just all feels less fun right now. So having gone from ‘follow me to find out my story of how I am creating a book’ to archive and occasional post, my online ‘sales pitch’ has self imploded. At least for now. I’m as fickle as social media when it comes to social media. I see and have benefitted from its upsides and I can see it’s many horrors. I dedicate a whole section of my book to this love hate relationship in a section called Slave to the Algorithm. A nod to Grace Jones, just one of many pop culture references I littered throughout the book. Which reminds me of the other algorithm attempt I set up to help promote/accompany my book. The Spotify playlist of all the lyrical nods in the book. This was fun to put together, and a decent playlist to boot.
I have a few poetry performances coming up in the next few months, and appearances on podcasts being lined up, so there will be other ways to promote the book. All the eggs will not being going in the social media basket, and the cold feet of promotion are not frozen solid. I just need them to thaw a little and start taking a few different directions.
This edition of Poems and That is free to read. Poems and That is a publication where I share stories about the many things I have learned through sharing my poetry with the world.
If you want to support my writing please consider sharing my words or buying my collection Proving I Exist , which is available on Amazon now and all royalties go to Choose Love and Refuge.
I like remembering there’s no rush either. I used to think (and deffo read somewhere) that you had like 6 months post publication to promote. But why is that? Why can’t we slowly introduce our words to the world. That feels nicer. Also, “digital chip paper” - like this x
I’ve always been useless at selling stuff. My premise being that I wouldn’t want anyone to buy something they didn’t actually want, cos I hate that type of pressure, so fully understand where you are coming from.