Your Self Is Too Glorious To Promote

one perspective shift makes all of this much easier

“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”

William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience

Welcome to the first week of this promo & marketing course for writers. (How on-brand is it that I decided to launch this before I had a catchy name for it?) Anyway, before we begin, grab a notebook or open a new document and jot down quickly and briefly:

• How would you define self-promotion? How does it work?

• What makes you most uncomfortable about it?

• Where did you learn the above?

Do this before you read the rest—it’ll be useful to have a sense of where you’re beginning.

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You might have noticed that in my intro post to this series, apart from the first sentence, I carefully avoided the phrase “self-promotion.”

That’s because the method I propose to you is actually something quite different, quite the opposite.

You will not be promoting yourself. You will be promoting your work—your writing, your books, your ideas, the stuff you produce which can fly out from your body and land in someone’s home. Where they read it and it does something for them. It moves them. It changes the color of their day in a way that is highly particular and valuable. It makes them look at their life with fresh eyes, maybe. Or it reminds them of the brilliant, vivid anger they felt as a teenager. Or it helps them pass the hours while they wait to hear their results from a medium-scary medical exam. Or it is so wild and unruly that it makes them think: You know, life is pretty cool. Or it holds a lantern inside an experience they have also lived through, but have not had the courage to venture into or explore on their own.

Your self is something even vaster than all of that. It is a book of days in the form of a body. It lives within possibility. It has a wild and ragged heart. Like an iceberg, most of it is invisible to the eye. It is a field of magical contradictions. It has remade itself countless of times during your life already, and will do countless times more. Your self is not possible to market or promote because it is not really possible to describe, in spite of my attempt here. Like the crustacean in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, any attempt to separate it or classify it is practically an insult.

This is a tremendously important distinction to make.