Too Shy?

I'm doing an online course with ACFW this month on "Too Shy to Pitch and Promote." I'll be doing the same workshop as an early bird course at Write His Answer in Estes Park Colorado. If this is something you wrestle with as I do we'd love to have you at either or both venues.

This is a common problem with writers as they are often drawn to writing because they are more comfortable communicating that way rather than having to do it face-to-face. But we have to do it. If life were fair we could just stay home and write our stories and when we finished we'd go burn a special piece of paper in the fireplace and it'd send up a signal like they do when they elect a Pope. When they saw the signal publishers would line up four abreast fighting for the chance to offer us an OBSCENE amount of money for our book and just take care of everything from that point while we wrote the next one.

You holding out for that? Well, I hate to break it to you but we can't get out to meet with agents and editors to get our book contracted, and if we can't meet the public in booksignings and generate publicity and visibility, then we're probably wasting our time writing. We simply don't have any choice, if we want to write, we've got it to do.

Fortunately there's something we can do about it. I ran across this program for the first time when I was in a hospitality room talking to a bunch of writers before I presented to them the next day. I started hearing this complaint over and over and realized I needed to give an entirely different program the next day.

Over the past years it has been given close to a hundred times. I've seen people go through it, buy into it, and right at that same conference say it made a big difference in the way they handled the conference. I've seen others say it was a nice program but it just wasn't them. It's strictly up to the individual, but there is a reason that 85% of all manuscripts will not be substantually published. We can't afford to have anything working against us.

Come join us and let's have some fun with this.