Internet Sirens and How To Survive Them - by SC Skillman

At the beginning of this post I may ask the question: do we, as writers, love googling publishing and writing gurus and listening to their every word to see if there are any nuggets of golden advice we may take into our own lives, so we may replicate their success? 

I have attended several writers conferences over the past years, and to me the greatest value of these (as also with local writing groups) is the fellowship we find with fellow writers, along with the value of  (occasionally) learning new things from experts in the industry who may help us in our own writing and publishing journeys. 

But then we have to be very careful, and exercise our own gifts of discernment.

So what I have to say in this post by no means devalues those who genuinely seek to help others, by coming alongside them and listening to their situation, without seeking to overwhelm or control them or indeed imposing their own agenda on them.

In the writing and publishing world these days we are often told that it is no longer sufficient to be just an author. No, you have to be a promoter as well, and a self-publicist, and a PR specialist. You have to master the art of the press release, learn how to write appealing advertising copy, know how to pitch yourself to someone in a single sentence in a lift, and master numerous pieces of software in order to orchestrate them all skilfully with one end in mind – to sell your product, i.e. your new book.

There has grown up a vast industry of people who, using the internet, specialise in sharing their keys to success, with the implication that the members of their audience only have to apply these same keys, to achieve a similarly brilliant outcome.

But life does not work like that. I would suggest, in this piece, that the best advice you may receive (if anyone has the right to advise you at all)  is from someone who knows you personally and has taken the time to learn about your own situation, and understands where you are coming from: not an internet siren.

This may be controversial (and I hope it is, for one internet siren I avidly read, when I was trying to find out how to get more people to read my blog posts said, 'Controversy plus outrage equals traffic.')

Lest we forget, what started all this was a desire to create fiction, to bring people to life who never existed, to dream up worlds for them to inhabit, and sometimes to find that ‘they come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it’, as Graham Greene explained so eloquently in his novel The End of the Affair.

On occasions, as Graham Greene says elsewhere in this novel, we may get a strange feeling when the lines blur between the real world and the fictional world of our own creation. Then perhaps we do indeed feel like characters forced here and there by an unseen hand, without any free will. I fear that in today’s climate we as authors can feel like that, when voices ‘out there’ are constantly telling us what to do to make ourselves visible, to get readers to pay attention to us, to direct the searchlight of attention upon us, notice our books, and buy them.

So let us try at least sometimes to stand outside the plot that other people outline for us, and refuse to be conditioned by it; and this may mean tying ourselves to the mast, until we have sailed safely past the sirens who may lure us onto the rocks.

SC Skillman

SC Skillman

psychological, suspense, paranormal fiction & non-fiction

My next book, Paranormal Warwickshire

will be published by Amberley Publishing on 15th June 2020

and is available to pre-order now from Amazon, or from the publisher, or from your local bookshop.