For a long time I wasn’t into marketing, to put it mildly. I only had a vague idea of what it involved. Having worked in education and the arts all my life, it felt as of marketing was ‘over there’ somewhere and we (teachers / lecturers / creators) were someplace else. When I did encounter marketing it was often with suspicion. A feeling not helped when marketing seemed to misunderstand or misrepresent, or appeared shallow, surface, fluffy, to reinforce stereotyping, and heteronormativity, or sometimes it appeared downright prejudice, particularly against women (through over sexualisation) and anyone considered ‘marginal’ (through invisibility). So in my head I lumped all marketing into one basket marked ‘not for me’ and didn’t examine my own assumptions and massive generalisation.
Then what happened? I met some people who I liked, who were into marketing. And some people who were clever who were into marketing. Some people who loved books who did some great marketing, and some writers who knew all about marketing.
Then the following revelation dawned on me (slowly). I’m sometimes slow at processing – it comes with being dyslexic – but I quite like it when things occur to me slowly, because I get to see the workings. Anyway, here’s the revelation:
I also realised that, to me, bad = not kind, not thinking stuff through, not considering how your actions affect other people, prejudice, stereotyping, but any facet of life could go ‘bad’. On the one hand, any facet of life could be unkind, unthinking, prejudice, stereotyping. On the other, marketing isn’t necessarily unkind, unthinking, prejudice, stereotyping.
In sum, I had discovered ethical marketing.
The reason I was thinking all this was because, having moved from working in education full time to working for myself almost all the time, I had to learn to:
This meant confronting my uncomfortable relationship with marketing. It also meant a LOT of learning! In fact, a great deal of the time since I left my full time job has been spent learning. I didn’t know it would be like that, but looking back, it had to be that way. It’s been a steep learning curve.
Now I know for certain that teachers and lecturers would really benefit from learning about these things, from an ethical marketing perspective:
I know that because this was a part of life I was missing out on and, actually, learning these things has been a revelation. I feel like a richer person because I’ve learnt about marketing. Of course I’m not an expert and don’t expect to become one soon, but I feel that understanding more about ethical marketing has deepened my knowledge of the world, and my ability to look after myself.
A lot of writers do one or all of these to market their work:
And sit back and wait for the readers to come to them – and nothing happens. Then, probably – depending on how resilient the writer is – there’s a a cycle of despondency, melancholy and depression as a result.
And that’s been me too – I didn’t know how to do it, I didn’t have time to learn, let alone do the marketing properly. But now I’ve got to put into practice what I’ve learnt so far, especially as I have another book out, and an online course to market.
By the way, one of the things I learnt from Nick Stephenson while discovering more about marketing, was that ‘quality is the point of entry’. In other words, this is not a debate about the quality of the writing you’re selling. Assume that the writing has to be really good, and that the proof-reading and production needs to be really good. Yes, you could knowingly market something that’s a bit shoddy and badly written, but why would you want to do that? I also heard this sound-bite from Reid Hoffman: “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” I take that to mean – it’s not only OK, it’s a very good idea, to learn from DOING IT.