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  MARKETING!  WHO WANTS TO DO MARKETING?

  By Deborah Greenspan

  Most writers don't want to do marketing.  It exposes us to the one thing we hate the most—rejection.  Only now instead of one editor sending back a form letter (which we can shred in private) when we're actively marketing our books, we can get rejected on the telephone, or worse, in person. 

  The world isn't going to change, so I'll tell you what I've told myself:  Get over it!  We've all been rejected.  Walt Whitman had to self-publish his first book of poetry.  And I say if it was good enough for Walt, it's good enough for me.

If you're a writer, you have to write.  And if you want to continue to be a writer, eventually you have to publish.  It's really very simple: stop hiding; get out and take charge of your life.

Think of it this way: if you had been accepted by a large publishing house, you'd still have to do the talk shows, and the book signings, the interviews and the lectures.  The only difference would be that someone else would arrange it for you.  Someone else would get on the horn and handle the rejections. 

How do they do it?  The secret is twofold: The first part involves detachment.  So what if the bookstore says no?  So what if the talk show host has other commitments? It's not necessarily personal. The second part of the secret is simply to remember it's a numbers game.  The more people who say no, the closer you're getting to a "yes."