rejection - by Elaine - manners & mystery

elainewrites.substack.com · 846 words · saved by 4 readers

An irony of my life is that I work in marketing but have a hard time marketing my own work. Self-promotion has never come easily to me. When I publish a piece on this Substack, the most I will do is tweet about it. I don’t post on multiple social channels. I don’t have a list of Facebook groups and Slack communities where I share my content and encourage people to “amplify it.” I don’t enjoy trumpeting my work because I feel like, well, I just said it. Why do I have to then talk about what I just said? It screams “Hey, pay attention to me.” And this makes me uncomfortable. That’s not to say I’m philosophically against self-marketing. Some of the people I most admire do it really well. One way to justify it is you’re sharing something useful that could benefit others. Why wouldn’t you spread the word? A more cynical view: the underlying motivation is self-serving, e.g., gaining more followers, selling more books, getting a promotion. It’s really hard to separate the two. When you do som

Mostafa Dashti, Untitled, 1989 An irony of my life is that I work in marketing but have a hard time marketing my own work. Self-promotion has never come easily to me. When I publish a piece on this Substack, the most I will do is tweet about it. I don’t post on multiple social channels. I don’t have a list of Facebook groups and Slack communities where I share my content and encourage people to “amplify it.” I don’t enjoy trumpeting my work because I feel like, well, I just said it. Why do I have to then talk about what I just said? It screams “Hey, pay attention to me.” And this makes me…

rejection - by Elaine - manners & mystery

saved by

related reading