On stage or in the shadows……

I read it everywhere…….to be successful you almost have to brain-wash people into ‘wanting’ you. You have to shout about how good you are, how talented you are, how ‘out there’ you are. You have to shout the loudest, the longest, be a bit of a diva. You have to ‘brand’ yourself (your physical self) in order to be noticed.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. On Tuesday night I found out that I had made it to the semi-finalist section of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for my novel The Hidden – 10,000 entries into the competition and now I am in the last five for my category ‘Thriller’.

I’d been nervous in the run-up to Tuesday, knowing that they would announce the semi-finalists on that day. I was ecstatic when I heard but I find it hard to shout about it too much.

But I am so grateful to Amazon for the chance to be read. My novel The Hidden was written after two years of research and was finished in April 2001, just two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Because the plot involves terrorism, no publisher or agent would touch it at the time. I rewrote the novel 10 times and then it languished on a computer pen drive for many years. I dragged it out of the computer file on a whim in December 2012 and submitted my application to the ABNA competition. Now it is out of the shadows and that’s fantastic. But I still feel more comfortable in the shadows. I want my novel to be read and my words to talk, but I don’t want to say much at all.

This privacy mania comes being a person who does not like ‘diva’ behaviour at all. All I want to do is write my stories. I don’t want to sell myself but my stories. I watch favourite authors on social media and rate them according to how they present themselves. If they go over the top, I stop liking them and it turns me off reading their work. So the same must apply to over-selling yourself as a writer, digitally. 

I don’t mind if people hate me or like me (their choice) but I want them to buy and read my novels. Digitally promoting yourself and your product comes down to the promotion of self, and I don’t want to promote my ‘self’ rather my stories.

Is there a way around this? I am not sure. Because in this digital world everything comes down to ‘personality’. Personality sells. Having worked in PR for many years I know all about this.

My novels are not about me. They are fictional stories that I make up in my mind. Then comes the act of setting the stories down on ‘paper’. Once that is finished I launch them into the world and hope that people enjoy them. It seems like a simple process. Is the digital world simply a way of reminding people these stories are out there? 

On ABNA I am thrilled but I am just one person who exists in a world of talented people; so many talented writers with wonderful stories to tell. To me it’s the story that’s important not the author.

Please send me your thoughts. 

Warm wishes xxx