All That Well-intentioned Advice

[Peg Herring]

People are always starting sentences with, "You should ...." I'm amazed and sometimes amused at the advice I get. The other day someone told me that I should "ask around and see if any bookstores will let me do a booksigning."
I never would have thought of that on my own!

I get all kinds of advice about using the Internet to become famous. Some of it is in the form of emails that promise I'll get thousands of hits a day. Some is from people who have a friend of a friend who figured out how to maximize his presence on the web. Of course no one offers to invest the time and/or the money it would take to accomplish these things. They just recommend that I do it.

One person of my acquaintance gets quite upset with me when I don't sign up for webinars and other offerings that promise amazing (actually unbelievable) returns. I learned long ago that they usually offer the same advice that my publisher provides in the author handbook: arrange interviews where your book connects with people's lives, get your name out there, be professional. Yes there are ways to market that I haven't tried, but each writer has to decide what works for her. We wouldn't have time to write if we did all the things we're advised to do by the media experts and our advice-giving friends.

I think we decide, sometimes subconsciously, what our limits will be, what lies within our comfort zone. If that limits how famous I become, I'm willing to live with it. I'd rather concentrate on writing the best stories I can write, and I think spreading myself all over the real and the cyber worlds will detract from that. So thanks for the advice, but I'll leave the webinars out of my life for right now.