do what you love, but solve for distribution

if you truly believe in what you do, self promotion doesn’t feel cringe because the feeling that the world needs what you’re sharing trumps any embarrassment to put yourself out there. sharing is only cringe when you don’t actually believe in what you do/it feels out of alignment

Nobody can read your mind. Share your ideas. Tell people what you’re working on. Communicate your vision, even if it’s only half baked. Stir the pot.

from Make your Stuff by Austin Kleon:

“it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.”

“If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.”

“Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.”

“Teaching people

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self-promotion is important:

In the months leading up to pub day, I sent approximately 8,613 emails out to friends, professional contacts, people I talked to once in a buffet line at a writing workshop 3 years ago, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who have never heard of me or my little book, offering them galleys and (in some cases!) dir

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surrender to the cringe

Take a moment to consider why you’ve heeded the call. What’s stopped you from doing the damn thing? A fear of being cringe? A fear of not being good enough?

It's all going to flicker out at some point with everything else.

When you first start out, life will be exactly how it was before you started doing the thing except now t... See more

Branding gets a bad rap, but it’s heart work, which writers already do by default. It’s asking yourself, “what is my work really about, what is its essence, what is its purpose, what does it evoke?” Branding is just taking the answers to those questions and making sure each decision you make about your work stays true to them.

In the months leading up to pub day, I sent approximately 8,613 emails out to friends, professional contacts, people I talked to once in a buffet line at a writing workshop 3 years ago, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who have never heard of me or my little book, offering them galleys and (in some cases!) directly begging them to cover ... See more

My new X, is coming out in X(!) days and I am…shall we say? panicking just a smidgen. Perhaps because X has been in development for so long, I just kept pushing it to the edges of my mind, like “Oh, that’s ages away! I’ll get to marketing or promoting it or talking about it when it’s time.” Or maybe it’s just the fact that I’m not really

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