Last week I read a Writer’s Digest online article that hit me in the solar plexus, given it was already a difficult time due to the 9/11 anniversary, an event that still holds a great deal of residual trauma for me with respect to the Pentagon in particular. This year, of course, it was compounded by a misogynistic nightmare of a world that is currently the not-so-great USA.
“Be Authentic, They Said. Sell More Books, They Said.” was an eye-opener in which author Ann Garvin shared her unease with marketing strategies, specifically her struggle to be authentic and sell more books at the same time.
The article begins with a workshop at a writer’s conference in 2010, wherein the presentation on “hooking readers” triggers a negative reaction in Garvin: “A hot creeping anxiety has me fidgeting in my chair. If anyone had asked me why, I couldn’t have articulated it clearly. It would take me years to put into words the reason I wanted out of the room.”
The first part of that description is very much how I reacted when attending my first writer’s conference (and subsequently my only one so far) in Las Vegas in 2019, where I was initially attempting to pitch (and supposedly glean tips on marketing) my first Other Worldly novel published in early 2020, Alienable Rights.
And that last part? Well, it’s taken me years to realize the actual root of my anxiety regarding the attack on the Pentagon and the months and years thereafter. Just as it’s taken time to fully realize why I could barely breath and just wanted to cry during those few days in early May of 2019 when I attended that writer’s conference.
In her article, Gavin explained that it took years to “trace the darker roots of her unease…especially as the peddlers of sales messaging have softened their rhetoric into what they call respectful urgency…The old one-sided pitch…has become the pseudo-collaborative…” with “careful euphemisms [that] aim to inspire trust, but their language, at best, works to bypass resistance and at worst, erodes the intuition so many of us are already conditioned to dismiss.”
As my Other Worldly series protagonist Rowan Layne would say, boy howdy and ya think? Especially for females. Because here’s what Garvin bowled me over with next:
“I finally started to understand an unsettling parallel. As a woman who has experienced violence from men who used confidence, concern, and offers to help as bait, marketing phrases never sound innocent to me.” Instead, she said, “My nervous system hears a pattern, one that alerts me to potential danger.”
At that writer’s conference in 2019, I was weeks shy of finally ridding myself of a years-long emotionally and physically abusive relationship, not even remotely having begun the process of healing. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, despite that drafting Alienable Rights beginning in 2017 had been a catharsis and a diversion.
Indeed, white-washed scenes of that horrific situation were included in my first novel, with Rowan as much in denial as I was about how bad it got. Not to mention utterly oblivious to the reality that it would take me years to fully begin trusting people again, including those offering advice about writing and publishing.
Gavin brought it all home to me when she described how, “Marketing borrows the language of care, but its aim is to control. It’s a slight of hand that appears as friendly as a handshake but ends in transaction.” And then her ultimate kicker about controlling behavior: “My issue is with the moral theater of authenticity, with the instruction of performing warmth, access, and friendliness with a secondary agenda: to move a product. Engaging in manipulation instead of speaking out against it.”
Exactly why I grapple with selling my books. Because I don’t “perform” warmth or access or friendliness, I just am those things in any given situation. And when I’m not? It’s because I—and Rowan Layne—are more inclined to speak about against that which doesn’t feel honest or trustworthy or authentic. Like transparent answers that never came about the worst defense and intelligence failure of our nation on September 11, 2001.
So, how to build an audience? As Gavin said, “If I want people to purchase—and I do, because my career in writing depends on it—I have to talk about purchasing my books. And…if I refuse to turn myself into a sales funnel wearing concealer and sincerity, what exactly am I supposed to do?…I would like to say I have found the answer: marketing with transparency, using honest language. To say ‘Here’s what I made. Here’s why I think it matters. I hope you read it. If you don’t that’s okay.’”
She concluded with, “I don’t know if a writer can survive and scale by refusing what marketing calls strategy. What I do know is this: I am still that a woman in that conference room, sixteen years later…unsure if the people next to me are a lead, a friend, or just someone trying to get past my defenses for something else entirely.”
Exactly how I feel upon engaging someone new, seven years after that conference and extricating myself from a very bad and dangerous relationship in which gaslighting manipulation was a constant. I realize now why I’ve ultimately sought readers as opposed to buyers. Yet asking women to trust me that my books are worth reading can be tricky when it is not easy to entrust them with reading my books. Because therein beholds a portal into my psyche, and my heart. Because when I write, I’m just being me, and being real about how I feel about current events.
But in the words of Ann Gavin, whose latest book, Tell Two Friends: A Novel, arrives for me tomorrow, I hope women (and perhaps some open-minded men) will read my Other Worldly novels. And here’s one reason what I’ve written matters. Authenticity hasn’t been a struggle for me, other than being unable to admit to myself—and in my novels via Rowan Layne—that things were far worse in that sordid relationship than I wanted to believe or accept.
But, amazingly, as I’ve kept writing seven novels and counting, Rowan Layne gradually begins to heal and to trust others in ways that I sometimes still grapple with when it comes to working through past trauma. My thought is that there are many women out there who can relate, and my heartfelt wish is that my novels resonate with them in a manner that brings realization and healing to them as well.