@DJDarren When I came to understand how much self-promotion went with attempting to get interest in anything you've made, the interest I'd long had in seeing whether anyone else would want to read (even pay to read!) something I'd written just died. I could never do that. Just not something I'm capable of doing.
(Not that anyone necessarily would want to read anything I wrote, not looking to toot my own trumpet here, just that I have written a novel, and partly written another, and I felt that there was enough about it that with work and extensive redrafting I might be able to make something good of it. I mean, it was probably rubbish but I do feel there's a small chance that I'm capable of writing things worth reading, but I'm not going to if that sort of thing is at the end of it.)
I scanned that article, and woah. So many thoughts about that.
I write books and self-publish. So promoting them is important, obviously.
And yet, I find that being here on Mastodon, chatting about my books rather than pushing promos, has done more to find readers and fans than any bought promo I did.
Because here, it's for people, not algorithms. It's fun rather than a chore, and I believe that shows.
To me, this is the future of finding my readers. (I'll never do TikTok.)
@DJDarren doesn't it come down to how much and how fast you want it? I do minimal promotion. I stream folk songs once a week on Friday night and, when I remember, I make the event in advance and post the link here. And I make occasional videos about how I use Loopy Pro.
I've been doing it that for four years. My live audience is still small, but my subscriber count has just crept above 600 and I'm still enjoying it.
Self-promotion's a ballache, but persistence and patience work eventually.
@DJDarren I know I can happily stream to no audience, because the last video I put out was exactly that. I thought I was streaming, but I forgot to press the 'go live' button on the YouTube website and did two hours of 'live' instruction with precisely no viewers.
Weirdly, the fact that I thought I was streaming helped make the instruction more coherent compared to an earlier attempt to cover the same ground in a deliberately non-live shot. I still need to edit it down though.
When I was podcasting and doing radio, the worst part of it was spamming my shit on the timelines.
Believe it or not, I’m not naturally gregarious. I’d far rather be left alone, not taking up much space in the world. So having to post links to my output several times a day felt absolutely awful to me; thrusting my adverts into the faces of people who liked me enough to follow me.
But what’s the alternative in a world where we’ve all been made to feel like we have to monetise our hobbies?
It ALWAYS felt like an imposition, a betrayal of the trust of the people who followed me. If they didn’t care the first time, then who am I to force it into their feeds a second time?
My brain would tell me “If they really gave a shit about your crappy podcast, they’d subscribe, so you don’t need to do this”.
And honestly, that’s a huge part of what eventually stopped me. Being able to see the numbers, and knowing that me putting myself out there wasn’t really making a difference.
I’d tell myself that I was making it for me, putting something in the world that I wanted to exist. And at times I almost 100% believed that, but while that certainly was true, I just couldn’t square with doing it unheard. Or at least, largely ignored.
And no matter how much I spammed the feeds, none of it made any real difference. I made myself feel like shit for nothing.
@DJDarren I stopped putting music out for the same reason - I'm very introverted/socially anxious and prefer to be left alone, and having to continually care about reactions, traction and numbers was exhausting to me. So I just stopped putting it out.
Now I make music when I feel like it, and enjoy the creative process without worrying about whether it's ok to spaff the links all over everyone else's feed. Much happier!
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