I’m delighted to be at the SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in Charlotte, after two years of attending only virtual writing events. I was worried for a while that the weather might intervene, and decided to take the train down rather than chance driving in a lot of rain. I hate driving in heavy rain.

The first session I found myself in was about building an online kidlit platform. Thank you, Micki Bare, for a thorough look at the various forms on online presence and the ways in which they differ. Also, I didn’t know you could make a Facebook page that was accessed separately from your personal FB stuff. I’ll have to look into that.

But if you’ve read my earlier blog post Too Many Books, Too Little Time—writers want to write, not do marketing, you know that marketing is not my forte. In fact, I have complained loudly that I want to write, not spend time coming up with interesting tid-bits for strangers online. Yet I do recognize the difficulty of just relying on writing a good book to get people’s attention when we live in a world that is FULL of very good books already. And yes, people do spend a lot of time looking at what other people say online, so there’s an opportunity there.

I’m usually good about doing whatever exercise the speaker assigns—write something about a past experience, list five children’s books that you wish you’d written, that kind of thing. But “Take a silly selfie and post it using the following hashtags”? I started to take out my phone, then thought—wait, I don’t do Twitter. I don’t even want to do Twitter. Where else can you post with hashtags? (Answer—Instagram, apparently, but I don’t have that either.)

As you notice, I’m now experimenting with using a hashtag in the title of a blog post. Will it actually be recognized as a hashtag? I kind of doubt it, but it makes a good title.

All of the above is actually a preamble to some thoughts I had while waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my restaurant check. (I think the weather meant they had more diners than they are used to—either that or the weather left them very understaffed.)

Why can’t writers just hire someone else to do all the marketing stuff without any involvement from them? The answer, presumably, is that people want to read something personal, something that is actually about the author or has some connection to the author’s life. But why? The author is not the book character. The author may or may not be a terribly interesting person. (Everyone is interesting to some degree, but why should an author be any more interesting than your next-door neighbor?)

It’s unfair, I thought. Authors didn’t always have to put themselves out in public to this extent. One used to be able to write and still be a private person.

Then I thought—what about actors?

An actor isn’t the character he plays in the movie, but actors have always known that publicity was a crucial part of being an actor. People expect at least some engagement from them, or that they will at least tolerate a lot of gossip about themselves—maybe even go out of their way to create some interesting rumors. The crucial difference seems to be that actors are SEEN. They tell their stories with their faces and their bodies. And that has always made them very interesting to the people watching their films, unlike authors, who are unseen creators. The actor’s appearance in a film creates interest in the actor—something which doesn’t happen nearly as much with books.

Studios know that interest in a particular actor creates interest in that actor’s films. So I guess managing and encouraging that publicity becomes part of the job. Publishers want authors to generate interest in themselves, but they want them to do so even before the book creates any interest in them.

I’m not sure what to conclude from this. That authors need a new conception of their role? That they should hire publicity people to do all the tweeting for them? That the whole system seems really unsustainable in a world of seven billion people connected by internet?

I don’t know. I do know that I need to get some sleep, because tomorrow starts early and there are still many exciting sessions to attend at #CarolinasKidLit2022.

Till next post.