You can learn a lot about self-marketing from watching the video Isn’t She Great? a fictionalized version of the author’s life starring Bette Midler and Nathan Lane. Jacqueline Susann was the master. When her first novel Valley of the Dolls was published, she and her husband created their own marketing campaign which included arriving at the distributors’ loading docks with doughnuts and coffee and complimenting the teamsters union. She and her husband made a cross-country tour arriving at bookstores (pre-Barnes and Noble days) in every small town to introduce herself and her novel. She memorized the shop owner’s name and birthday and arrived with bravado to introduce herself to them personally.

It worked. Valley of the Dolls is noted to be the best-selling novel of all time at 30 million copies sold.

Why I bring this up is that an artist friend and I were discussing self-promotion and what it takes. As you can see from this example, Jackie put as much into the publicizing of her book as she did into the writing of it, if not more. This friend mentioned a colleague who seemed to be spending more time on social media and self-promotion than on honing her creative skills. Not jealousy, but observation. It sounded to me like this artist would find a more profitable niche actually helping other artists spread their message.

There’s a fine line between being the creator and letting others know about it. In the movie version of Susann’s life, the literati were not exactly flattering. There was a television clip of an interview with Truman Capote about the success of Valley of the Dolls. His quote was, “That’s not writing. That’s typing.” (Interestingly, on Wikipedia the quote is attributed to Gore Vidal.)

I’m curious if any of you struggle between being the business owner and promoting the business. Where are you in the mix?

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