Can Self-Promotion Not Suck?
You know where I'm going with this... yes and here's how and I MEAN IT
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We’re all meat sacks with dreams. Some of us live down to our toes every day and some of us have been habituated out of it by trauma or chronic pain or corporate norms. Grief, dignity breaches, horrible news, the terror of keeping up and seeming the part and impressing the people, and a whole lot of tired.
AND. We all want to feel alive.
To care and connect. To dream.
What if self-promotion felt like that?
Which isn’t exactly the cultural story. A piece in Vox this month explores the “tyranny of the personal brand” and asks what it’s doing to our humanity that artists and authors and even 9-to-5’ers now feel an obligation to become marketing wizzes.
The algorithm (and our bosses/publishers/record labels) push us to do it, Lady Macbeth-style:
“You’ve got to spend your time doing this even though it’s corny and cringe and your friends from high school or college will probably laugh as you “try to become an influencer.”
You’ve got to do it even when you feel like you have absolutely nothing to say, because the algorithm demands you post anyway. You have to do it even if you’re from a culture where doing any self-promotion is looked upon as inherently negative, or if you’re a woman for whom bragging carries an even greater social stigma than it already does. You’ve got to do it even though the coolest thing you can do is not have to.”
And then
responded with a spicy provocation: self-promotion doesn’t work anyway. Plus a brilliant take-down of “look at me” culture and a how-to solution you should read.But here’s where I come in. I want to call us ‘round the fire to talk about what we’re really talking about when we talk about self-promotion.
Because most folks fear it.
And try to avoid it.
And that’s ‘cuz we’ve been handed all this cultural crap about it meaning we’re a sell-out or that we’re bragging or that we’re self-absorbed. Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to about self-promotion—myself included, I have definitely talked to myself about this—has drama about it. And it’s not platform-specific. It’s not even late capitalism-specific. It’s as old as time—or at least as old as us folks who the public wasn’t entirely made for stepping out into it anyway and talking anyway and claiming our space anyway.
And equally old is the full-body hit of stigma panic and learned inter-generational breath-holding and bracing-for-impact that comes with it.
But… at some point we have to self-promote anyway, right?
So naming that self-promotion’s hard for a reason helps. It’s validating AF. But figuring out how to do it anyway (rather than hiding, downplaying, self-recriminating, risking the tragedy of our art not finding its audience) helps even more. And especially figuring out how to do it SO IT FEELS GOOD ON THE INSIDE.
Which is always the real revolution.
Here’s the secret I found for myself when I was thrust from a zero-self-promotion-required career behind the scenes to totally public:
Self-promotion is never self-promotion.
Self-promotion is only ever about the other person/people.
Last week I defined authenticity—the doable kind—as talking about what you care about like you care about it. Lemme add to that: self-promotion is talking about what you care about like you care about it for them.
Them is whoever your shit helps.
If it doesn’t help anyone, then OK yes respectfully: you’re doing it wrong.
But if it does, and you aren’t fiercely connecting to that fact every time you talk about your shit, then, respectfully: you’re also doing it wrong.
Hi. I know. But try this: light a candle and wiggle your body out, and then grab a notebook and write down 13 reasons why your thing (what I’ve been lovingly referring to as your shit because it could be anything—your book, your pod, your sidehustle, your project that feels dangerously close to your heart, your idea for a center in your community, your art) needs to be in the world.
Who, besides you, it helps. You may have to dig deep and get creative after about number 5 but of course that’s the point.
Not to be dramatic, but this exercise could change your life. It changed mine.
When I was hot ‘n heavy promoting my book last year I made a sacred agreement with myself to never, ever, not once, say “please buy my book.” Instead it was always something like “if you’re needing etc etc, I made this for you.” Not because I was sticking to a script and not because I was policing myself (do not recommend), but because I was fiercely connecting to who it could help. It felt like an experiment in alignment, in literally staying in my spine. It felt like an orientation to the world. Love, not fear. Abundance, not scarcity. Agency, not shoulds. We, not I.
Fear says: no one will get my thing, no one will like me, I’ll never make money, I won’t be of value to the world, I’m a failure, I’m a mistake, I, I, I, shame shame shame. It’s primal and I get it deeply and I’m sending you and me a big squeeze for whenever we accidentally go there, ‘cuz trying to promote from there does wholly suck.
But love says: we are all meat sacks with dreams. We are light and beauty and hope and yearning, searching for it in each other. I’ll make it easier for them to find.
So my book? I made it for them.
Every “them” who needs a hug of permission to show up all the way in public as magnificent as they actually are. Does it serve me if people buy my book? Of course, but because it serves them. Any book sold is good for the spirit, which makes me more useful. Any dollar earned helps me do the work more and elsewhere and with new folks.
It’s this interconnectedness that we lose when we emphasize the self in self-promotion.
Self-promotion—whether it’s marketing online or just sharing about our shit in a conversation—doesn’t undermine our humanity if we remember that we’ve made what we’ve made for them and now we’re talking about it for them.
It is humanity.
It’s the first cavepeople who thought, if I kill this big beast I’ll be able to feed not just myself but those other folks.
I should let them know.
And I feel the forces at play that strip us of this simplicity; I know in my gut the pressure to be as savvy online as the big brands with the Super Bowl ads derived of legion marketing professionals massaging the content till it produces the exact right tear at the exact right moment. (Shout out to Dove though, damnnnn.)
I feel it and I bet you feel it and the pressure is heavy and hard and loud.
But I also know that we get to unsubscribe and unsubscribe and unsubscribe. And I also know that it’s a radical, mischievous, political act to take a deep breath and go, nope. Self-promotion isn’t at others’ expense and it isn’t at the expense of my soul.
I’m gonna connect to my spirit, my wonder, my care, and tell people about the thing I made for them, with love. (Which, by the way, is what we tend to call “cringe” these days—the earnestness, the vulnerability, it takes to say this matters to me, without the veil of sarcasm or cynicism to hide our hearts back up and distance ourselves from its power. Vulnerability is power and we know it when we see it. We just gotta practice it and love on ourselves as we experiment and stretch and feel seen and heard and keep doing it anyway and together.
Which is what this Substack is for.)
Happy Valentine’s Day,
Samara
PS. AND here’s an example of me self-promoting!
If you’re dreaming of working with me, I’ve set up a page to learn more about how.
Voila. Here for you ❤️
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