Cyber chaos carnage!!!

One of the modern aspects of trying to be a writer nowadays is the fact that so much of your time is online trying to “get yourself out there” so to speak. In an ideal world, one would think that once the contract with a publisher has been signed and the book deal done, that the author can heave a sigh of relief and, apart from attending book signings, contributing to blogs etcetera and answering fan mail via Facebook or Twitter for example, that their social media work is done, right?

WRONG!

In the real world, this is where the hard yards really start. I for one still find in incredible that many publishers, considering that it is in their direct interests to have successful sales figures for their carefully sourced writers, still force the bulk of hard core advertising on the writers, who, let’s face it, often do not have the very different skill set required for hard sell. You need a thick skin and a bottomless well of patience, and, if you are like me, self promotion has never come easy. I for one feel like the time honoured stereotyped slick car salesman with the check jacket, gelled hair, gleaming teeth and the sleazy sales pitch, out to make a fast buck from the gullible public. Apart from that, with all the time fretting about promotions, many people admit to stopping writing – ahm, isn’t this the Catch 22 here? A writer is supposed to write after all.

The other aspect I for one am grappling with is just how much time is spent roaming in cyber space and I was stunned the other day when I totted up just how many social media sites I now have running. You tend to lose track of them all, and that, of course, is not a great look at any time. I find myself yearning for the kindly Promo Fairy who will wave her magic wand and somehow make all my pages look good, who will somehow put my work and name before eager thousands, if not millions and gloss over all my mistakes. Then of course, comes the TV interviews, the appearances at club meetings, schools and other hallowed institutions, the demand for you to appear on daytime TV amid the rabid applause of adoring fans…oooh, we’re really drifting into the realms of fantasy here, folks…

Sound familiar to you, anyone?

I can imagine that thousands of years from now some alien civilisation will intercept all of that desperate author self-promotion media garbage floating around in darkest space and wonder. They will no doubt muse on our sorry desperate state and use us as examples of what to avoid for their own future generations, and who can blame them? As a generation, the majority of younger people in particular are using the net  to escape from a world which they perceive as gone totally mad. They prefer to live online in their virtual reality instead of tackling with things as they really are, and when you see much of the web content, you realise just how many of us fail to read or scrutinise what we post properly. It can come across as pretty self centred, inane and shallow. The time honoured howl of “Notice me!” resonates like a biblical tsunami around the world. I can therefore imagine that some alien civilisation would indeed think us all warped and thoroughly self involved, especially when people post some pretty sick and feeble photos of themselves doing brainless acts online without thinking of the wider reaction they’ll get. Anything to get noticed, eh? Unhappily, to get ahead nowadays, we are all part of this grinding, inhuman, inexhaustible machine. And as an author, like it or not, this is our career reality.