My last post, on cringey academic posting, generated a lot of debate on Facebook. In the course of that conversation, we got into a discussion about self-promotion of our work on social media, and why people are so anxious/apologetic about doing it.

As I said on Facebook, I don’t really understand the anxiety about self-promotion. And that’s not because I have no anxieties about drawing attention to myself in real life. I do. Big time. I come from a big family. It’s always been hard to get a word in edgewise, when we’re all together, which as a kid, growing up, was every day. My tendency ever since has been to withdraw and watch.

But writing is very different for me.

I write for one reason only: to be read. I don’t write to put something on my CV. I don’t write to get tenure or promotion (though I have one, slightly embarrassing qualification to that, which involves The Reactionary Mind; another story for another day). I don’t write to get people angry with me. I don’t write to make people like me. I don’t write to get published in an anthology or edited volume or a specific magazine or newspaper. I just write to be read. That is all I care about. Well, that, and the topic I’m writing about; if I don’t care about the topic, I can’t write about it.

The only reason I’d not want someone to read what I’ve written is if that writing is bad. In that case, I simply don’t share it with anyone, except maybe my wife or the closest of friends. But if I’ve written it for readers, I want readers to read it.

So the question comes, how do you get people to read what you’ve written? Over the years, I’ve discovered that the only way I can get people to read my work is to share it publicly on these platforms and to urge people to read it. I’ve yet to find another way.

Unless you’re Pauline Kael or Susan Sontag or Vivian Gornick, no one is going to read something just because you’ve written it. You have to tell people—urge people, buttonhole people, strong-arm people—to read it.

If you think otherwise, I can only imagine it is for one of two reasons.¹ One is that you think you really are Pauline Kael or Susan Sontag or Vivian Gornick. The other is that you think we live in a meritocracy where the best things, no matter how unknown the author, get read by readers.

I can’t speak to whether you truly are Pauline Kael or Susan Sontag or Vivian Gornick. But I can tell you that the idea that we live in a literary meritocracy is so manifestly absurd, I can’t really believe you believe that.

One writer, one great writer, in fact, who knew better than to trust in the meritocracy was Bertolt Brecht. As I wrote in a post in 2015:

In 1941, Hella Wuolijoki, an Estonian-born Finnish writer and friend of Brecht’s, submitted a play to a literary competition in Finland. She didn’t win the prize. Brecht’s explanation? “she didn’t lobby. as if it weren’t the best things that most need publicity, intrigue and manipulation…”

On other fronts of promotion, though not of my work, I can’t recommend enough the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, which came out last year and is streaming now on Netflix. It’s about a family living in Rio in the 1970s, under the dictatorship, and then later in São Paulo. It stars Fernanda Torres, who’s riveting, as are all the other actors, particularly the children. And with the Tropicália soundtrack in the background, not to mention the omnipresent fear in the foreground, you feel like you’re living with this family under the dictatorship. Here’s the trailer.

And two of my favorites from the soundtrack.

1. I’m excluding from mention here anxiety or fear that what you’ve written is not good. As I said, if I think something I’ve written is not good or not of interest to other people—and I have both feelings quite often—I have a simple solution. I don’t share it. My feeling is that if I think or even just fear that my work is bad, why should I expect other people to read it? The only situation where that is the case is when you’re a student, when your teacher or professor has no choice but to read what you write. That, not surprisingly, is not the best classroom for learning how to write for readers who don’t have to read you. The other possibility, in this vein, is that you don’t really think what you’ve written is bad, but you don’t want to be perceived as thinking it’s good. I certainly understand that; no one wants to be thought of as arrogant, too confident, and all the rest. But here’s the thing: writing to be read requires a certain confidence, some might even say, arrogance. I don’t know how you can escape that. So no use pretending otherwise. ↩︎