The book isn’t you. The book is a story you love about characters you care about so much you wrote several hundred pages about them. Your job is to share your enthusiasm about them with those listening.

I discovered this because I borrowed some of my characters from my husband…so they weren’t ever mine–in my thought. So I found I could talk happily about them without thinking of it as being with me. Then, I began to apply this to the whole book experience…even when talking about the writing, one can say things like “Oh, I had so much fun doing it. It would be just great if someone else enjoyed it, too.”…the way you might talk about a book you enjoyed reading or an amusment park you enjoyed visiting.

It makes the whole thing fun instead of self oriented.

Doug, it’s an interesting conundrum and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how you handle it as compared to some of the other Wyrdsmiths.

Seriously, this is something I have thinking about, since it’s going to be creeping up on me real soon. To be blunt, I have no idea how I’m going to handle it, but I know I am going to have to do *something* — as always, the questions will be “What?” and “How much?” And there seem to be no right answers for this.

When I first started doing the con circuits a little over a decade or so ago, I sold myself pretty hard. It was a skill I’d picked up from my days as a freelancers in the gaming industry, and it seemed to translate well to the SF/F con circuit — so well that several editors and agents had assumed I was already published when I wasn’t (a double-edged sword, that). In the last few years, though, I’ve found my taste for pressing the flesh and pushing the “Me” brand has dwindled a lot — to the point that I am happier standing quietly with a drink then I am moving about and working the room. And I think that translates over to the wider self-promo ring, too: am I going to be more of the stand-in-the-corner-of-the-internet kind of writer, or am I going to get out there and push hard?

I suspect it will fall somewhere in the middle. I know I am going to have to revive that “sell” part of myself, but I don’t know if it will ever come back quite as strong. Like you, I am mostly Midwestern born and bred, and while I didn’t get quite the level of indoctrination as a person who grew up in the MN/WI/Dakotas “ya hey der” belt, enough rubbed off that it can feel a bit awkward at times to talk “Me.” I’ll just need to keep reminding myself that 1) No one is going to do it for me, and 2) People who show up to signings, read interviews, and the like are doing it to hear about me and the book. Not sure if that will translate into feeling any more comfortable, but every justification helps.