Is Self promotion shameful?

Are you ashamed of promoting yourself? We authors keep sharing buy links, reviews, and excerpts from our books. It might annoy a few, it might be useful for a few and a few might actually click on the link and buy our books. But have you ever felt ashamed of doing so? Is it odd to promote yourself? If the answer is yes, trust me, you are not alone feeling so. All of us feel odd about it but are compelled to take self-promotion as that’s the only option left. This article is to make you feel better about promoting yourself.

Back in school, when the teacher asked questions we were all asked to raise our hands to answer. We were asked to raise our hands only if we knew the answer to the question asked. We used to do that and used to keep calling out for mam until she/he noticed us. So basically we were asked to advertise to the class the fact that we know the answer to a certain question. Is this shameful? IS this odd? Isn’t this self promotion? According to me, it is. We were trained to market ourselves wherever possible and needed.

When you start promoting your business on facebook there will always be a friend or even many friends who will tell you those are annoying. They will tell you that you are crowding their time line. You first have to answer to yourself this question, is your account a personal one or a professional one to promote your work? If it’s personal create another account where you add your work related people, customers, potential customers and fellow writers or someone from your field.

Since I am a writer let me talk more from a writer’s perspective here. When people pass comments about you extensively marketing your book on facebook you tend to get disappointed and you become angry, don’t you? These guys passing comments are not those who rely on social media for their business or for their bread and butter. So they won’t understand the importance of being active on social media to sell well. Ignore their comments. Addressing it as a facebook status that gives out the smoke of your angry and irritation isn’t a good idea. By doing that you are only exposing that single person’s irritation to the rest of your friends list which is not required at all.

            There are a few who think self promotion is bad. They don’t want to promote their book at all assuming it will sell on its own because it’s too good. Really? Do you know the number of books getting published each year, leave off year, each month? If anything could sell without marketing it would be porn or a life-saving medicine. Even for porn there is a huge competition today and people invest on marketing even there. Even medicines are being advertised at clinics, haven’t you seen the pen that the doctors use?

            Haven’t you seen companies making ad films and spending on broadcasting it in the TV? What you do is no different from that. So never feel ashamed to promote yourself. If you don’t do that no one else will do it for you.

Are you following the #BookBiteByGB book promotion initiative? Read about it here.