The one thing you never stop hearing these days is, "Self-market!"

Thinking about what it would be like to be a writer? "Platform!"

Inspired by your favorite authors to try your hand with words? "Self-promote!"

Coasting in a state of bliss through multiple drafts of the book you never knew you had in you? "Social media!"

Veteran of a long publishing career with a small but loyal following, in danger of losing your publisher because your following's not bringing in enough bucks for the current dangerously-imbalanced economy? "Brand yourself!"

Brand yourself, indeed. Does anybody remember pyramid schemes?

I'm not a marketer. I don't really like salespeople. When someone comes to me with a persuasive plea meant to pry my money out of my wallet and into theirs, it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Maybe I'm just too easy to con, but, really, it gives me the screaming willies.

And what's even worse is having that effect on someone else. When I was 20, I was running a newsletter for the local art society, supposedly surviving on my ad sales. Most of the time I just showed up in people's stores and asked them if they wanted to buy ad space. Some did, some didn't. Once I got $360 for a six-month contract, and it carried me for four weeks.

Then one day I thought I'd try a new approach. I went into a woman's store and asked her if she'd like to "support the arts" by buying an ad. She fixed me with a steely eye and said, "I already support the arts."

I felt like she'd scraped me off the bottom of her shoe.

The thing about being a writer is that you get to do it alone. That's a huge part of its appeal for me. I live in the backwoods of Northern California, five miles from the nearest podunk town of 1000 people. I like being a hermit.

But now I'm a hermit with a new book coming out.

So I spent some time last week thinking long and hard about what I'm willing to do in the way of self-marketing. This is one of the reasons I went with self-publishing this time instead of sending out all those query letters, flashing my previously-published book like a badge, selling, selling, selling myself to potential agents so one of them could---hopefully---sell, sell, sell me to a publisher. It's not that I don't know how to write a great query letter. They're not that hard. I teach writers how to do it. It's not that I can't write a good, solid book proposal. Publishers have questionnaires for that. And it's not that I don't have a massive platform. The uglier the publishing economy gets, the bigger the hype aimed at new writers, and the bigger the market for my book.

It's that I don't like that game.

And everywhere you turn these days, you hear it's a game publishers demand you play. In spades.

Self-publishing, by contrast, doesn't demand anything. If I want to write a book and spend some of the earnings from my editing business on an ISBN and POD, I can do that. And I'm particularly lucky---I have the design background and connections with other editors to do it right. Honestly, I've spent many times this amount, in my life, just eating in restaurants when I didn't need to.

But the hype surrounding self-publishing still carries enormous pressure to self-market. How many books are out there right now teaching the hapless, hopeless writer how to promote themself? How many more are hitting the shelves, even as we speak?

Pyramid.

The thing is, the authors of those books aren't primarily writers. They're marketers. So the fact that their books come to our attention doesn't depend upon the books being well-written. It depends upon the marketing.

I'm interested in the writing. It's what I do. I love words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters. I love what happens when you delve deep into obscure (or not-so-obscure) techniques for amazing effects upon the reader, when you find just the right telling detail to snap a scene into focus with its subtle hidden agenda, when you write a line of dialog that both does and does not say exactly what that character means, when a paragraph pours out of you onto the page that you can't trace back to its source, a paragraph greater than the sum of its parts, an opal lying there on your desk between your hands, gleaming through the page.

Maybe it's because I was a poet in my earlier life. Or because I was a journalist. Or because I grew up in a house full of great fiction, where my mother walked into a bookstore once in 1971 and said, "I have eighty dollars and four children, and we're going overseas for two years. Stock me up."

But this week I gave myself permission not to self-market if I don't want to. I'll only do the marketing I feel like doing. Only if it's fun. And only if I like the people I deal with.

What's going to happen? I'm not going to wind up on the NY Times Best Seller list? I wasn't going to wind up there, anyway. I'm not going to be able to live off my book sales? I live off my editing business and technical writing contracts. I'm not going to be famous?

No. I am not going to be famous.

But I am going to have a book I can be really proud of, my dream book, a source of complex expertise born of all the research and professional experience I brought to this work, something helpful to share with the readers of other bloggers who also love this work I love, like Susan Johnston of The Urban Muse (who will be posting a guest post of mine on April 2) and Bob Spears of Book Trends Blog (who interviewed me last week), readers like you guys on She Writes.

Most of all, I'm going to have written the book I most wanted to read. Which is why I became a writer in the first place.