Warning! Contains irony!

I always have trouble promoting my work. I tend towards self-deprecation, which can often be viewed as a lack of confidence in my fiction -- "Well, if even the writer isn't bigging up this story then it can't be any good."

The whole saying-I'm-the-best-there-is thing doesn't come easily to me. (Even if a part of me genuinely does believe I am a literary genius.) So, to cover my discomfort, I add irony to the self-deprecation, spoofing the bombastic arrogance of so much marketing material -- "This story isn't as good as it could be. It's only the second greatest story of all time." This tends to be misinterpreted as genuine arrogance. I'm thinking I'm being all clever and multi-layered and sophisticated and all I'm doing is sending out mixed messages.

I know I'm not the only writer who feels uncomfortable about pimping their work. (Calling it pimping
probably doesn't help. I feel like I'm supposed to get people to fuck my stories. Actually, some editors I've worked with pretty much did that.) Some people just don't like being in the spotlight; it's the reason they became writers instead of actors or pop stars or some other creative endeavour where everyone looks right at you. And some people feel that self-promotion cheapens their literary creations. This despite the fact that writers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain quite happily gave public performances in order to promote their work.

In theory self-promotion is easier in the era of social media. I've got to admit that I went through a phase where I was actually half-decent at promoting my work. But that was on message boards, where there was some kind of etiquette. When Facebook came along and everything turned to endless hype, everyone shouting to make themselves heard over the egotistical outpourings of every wannabe hack with an internet connection, I found myself losing my taste for self-promotion.

So, in the interests of making my life easier could everyone just take it as read that everything I write is a work of staggering genius? No? Okay then, but next time you read a piece of my awkward promotional copy filled with feeble jokes to disguise my self-loathing just remember that you could have stopped it.

Seriously, I find this side of writing incredibly difficult. For example, I did a story this year that I'm really proud of and I wanted to plug it as effectively as possible. In a way that showed just how good I thought the story was, but in a warm funny manner that didn't sound like I was apologising for promoting my work.  The line I came up with was, "The best story you'll read this year. Unless you don't read it until next year."

I was pretty pleased with the line until I went to post it and realised that I couldn't bring myself to put it online. It still felt too cocky, too arrogant. The only way I felt comfortable about using it was by tricking myself into including it in a blog about the problems of self-promotion. A bit of a cack-handed way of going about it I admit, but it's a step in the right direction.

Maybe next time I'll actually work up the nerve to tell you which story I'm talking about.