Apparently, I’m an Author Now

Ok, well, there’s that.

There is, apparently, a New Mexico Book Association. At some point, I signed up to become a member. I think my motivation at the time was mostly to get my name on some fucking list somewhere. You know, one of those things you’re supposed to do when you’re pretending to know what the fuck you’re doing as an author.

But I haven’t really done anything with it since. I’ve been too busy working, writing, trying to finish Undertow, and, if I’m being completely fucking honest, enjoying the hell out of life with my fiancée. Priorities.

But yesterday, I got an email from the New Mexico Book Association, and something caught my attention. They have a book festival and a conference coming up in southern New Mexico, and they were offering New Mexico authors the opportunity to have their books represented there. So I fucking signed up.

Which, naturally, required marketing materials. Fuck. I fucking hate marketing. But I did it. I made the sell sheet. I gathered everything together. I figured out what they needed and got my shit submitted because, whether I like it or not, I know that writing the fucking books is only part of the job. At some point, you have to convince somebody to read the goddamned things.

That’s where the work is. It’s also how you eventually get paid. I get it. I don’t fucking like it, but I fucking get it.

So now And So, She Rose and A Survivor’s Guide to Survival are going to be sitting at the New Mexico Book Association booth at a couple of events in southern New Mexico. Cool.

Then I kept poking around, which is always fucking dangerous. Turns out the New Mexico Book Association has also reserved a booth at the Tucson Festival of Books next March. I stared at that for a minute and thought, well, fuck. That’s a pretty damn good opportunity. And Tucson is a pretty damn good ride.

So I signed up for that one too. And because apparently I’ve completely lost my fucking mind, I volunteered to help at the booth. So I guess I’m riding to Tucson in March.

Honestly, that’s probably the most Kate way imaginable to stumble into book marketing. Put a stack of books in the saddlebags, point Nyx toward Arizona, ride across the desert, replenish whatever books the association needs, and spend some time at a book festival pretending I know what the fuck I’m doing. I can get behind that kind of marketing.

But here’s the thing, and this is actually why I’m writing about this today: I fucking hate self-promotion. I hate telling people they should read my books. I hate posting about my books. I hate asking people to buy my books. I hate all of the performative bullshit that seems to surround trying to convince strangers that whatever the fuck you created deserves their attention.

Because where I come from, self-promotion sounds an awful lot like bragging. And bragging was a pretty good way to get yourself ostracized. You did your fucking work. You did it well. And if somebody noticed, great. You didn’t stand on the fucking table and announce how wonderful you were.

Except that doesn’t exactly work when you’re an author trying to build a readership. Unless you’re one of the lucky few who writes a fucking bestseller on the first try and some publisher grabs onto it and throws an entire marketing department behind you, you’ve got to do the work yourself. You’ve got to get your name out there. You’ve got to tell people the book fucking exists. You’ve got to build a readership. You’ve got to show up.

Which means the surprising part of all of this isn’t that I’m doing the marketing shit. It’s that I’m actually a little fucking excited about it. Not the marketing itself. Fuck that. I’m excited about what doing it means.

It means I’m finally taking this seriously.

Not writing seriously. I’ve been taking the writing seriously for a while now. I write constantly. I obsess over sentences. I rewrite shit until I’m sick of looking at it. I’ve published two books, and I’m working my ass off trying to get Undertow across the finish line. The writing was never the question.

The question was whether I actually believed this was something I was going to do. Whether being an author was something I was fucking around with after work, or whether it had become part of who I am. And apparently, somewhere along the way, it did.

Because now I’m making sell sheets. I’m joining book associations. I’m sending books to festivals. I’m signing up for events in other fucking states. I’m volunteering at booths. I’m planning motorcycle trips around fucking book festivals. I’m doing all of the shit that I’ve spent months saying I don’t have time to fucking do.

Because apparently I’ve finally decided that my words deserve readers.

That’s new.

Maybe that’s the part I’ve been avoiding. Writing something and throwing it into the universe is one thing. Standing behind it and saying, I wrote this. I think it’s fucking good. I think you should read it, is something entirely different. That requires a different kind of confidence. And apparently I’m finally finding some of that too.

Yes, I still have to finish Undertow. That’s next. I need to put my fucking head down, finish polishing it, and get the thing across the finish line. Then there will be another book. And another. I’ve already said I intend to leave a fucking library behind.

Well, libraries don’t mean much if nobody knows where to fucking find them.

So it’s time. Time to get myself out there. Time to start pushing my name. Time to start finding readers. Time to stop treating the thing I’ve been pouring so much of myself into as something happening quietly in the background of my life.

I’m a fucking author.

Apparently it just took a book association, a sell sheet, two books, a couple of festivals, and the prospect of a motorcycle ride across the desert for me to finally fucking admit it.

And you know what? That feels pretty fucking good. Worthy of sharing, in my not-so-humble, increasingly self-promoting opinion.