The Ick of Self-Promotion

In which I repulse myself. While wanting you to buy my book, obvs.

(just a girl, standing in front of a screen, asking you to love her book)

I was at dinner the other night and a writer I hugely admire was talking about the horror of asking other writers for blurbs (for the uninitiated, these are the pithy recommendations from other writers that appear on the book cover – ie “I raced through it!” “Her best book yet!” – that kind of thing). “It’s just the worst,” she said. “I want to die every time I have to ask. I wish publishers would ban it.” The table comprised mostly writers, and everyone there agreed; they understood the need to do it – it’s how we promote books, after all – but everyone cringed visibly at the thought of having to ask someone else to say nice things about their novel, even though each was critically well-reviewed, highly talented, and wouldn’t have thought twice about doing it for somebody else. Basically, it gave us all the ick.

I thought of this when I did an interview a few days ago where the interviewer observed incorrectly that I had sold XXX number of books. The number was out by a fair bit (15 million to be precise, and yes, even saying that feels like a kind of humblebrag) and I had to make a split second decision whether to correct her. I did. I told her the correct figure, but I felt weird about it. Like there was something deeply unseemly about insisting she used the correct, larger figure. Like in doing so I was bigging myself up too much, as the young people (probably no longer) say. The correction felt like another form of self-promotion.

I am knee deep in promo on Instagram just now, the only social media I use (apart from intermittent vague forays onto Bluesky, where I cannot yet decide if I have the energy to start building a platform all over again). Every day I feel obliged to post a clip from the latest interview or podcast, or some promo material that a publisher has made specially for this purpose, instead of my usual diet of once-a-week-pets-in-stupid-poses. For a few days I’ve been pondering whether to post a kind of humorous apology for all the relentless self-advertising. You know the kind of thing: “sorry! I won’t be doing this forever! Normal service resumed soon!” (please imagine this in a slightly awkward English accent).