The Right Kind of Trumpets by Dorothy Courtis

 A movement outside my window made me look up and there, strutting nonchalantly across the lawn in front of my French windows, was a brightly coloured pheasant. Bold fellow seemed supremely confident in his finery.

It's not something I'm at all good at. Strutting my stuff. In other words, marketing and promoting my books. I know I need to put the effort in to let potential readers know that my books are out there, just waiting for them to buy and hopefully enjoy. 

But all the stuff that goes with it - photographs of me in bookshops and at events, holding my book up and grinning foolishly at the camera - or caught unawares looking even worse... No, it's really not me! (I don't mind the events - in fact I love giving talks about my books and my faith.)

Maybe it's the way I was brought up: we were firmly told that boasting was not permitted. And there are plenty of Bible verses about how God really does not like the proud! So it sounds as if blowing our own trumpets is not seemly for Christian writers.

So how can we focus attention on our books and not on ourselves? For myself, I love the invisibility of ALCS and PLR and Amazon KDP. All it takes is a few moments on the keyboard in the privacy of my own study, and from then on, the money just arrives in my bank account.  

OK, not enough to live on. And maybe I'm not actually being a good steward of the talents God has given me or the books He's enabled me to write and publish. It's a sad fact for those of us who prefer the stay-at-home writing part of the job, but the other unavoidable part of the job is the marketing and promotion. 

And maybe just like cleaning the shower or the oven or whichever household task you most loathe, recognising it's a non-negotiable and putting it on the to-do-list is really the only way to get started. You don't have to launch yourself out of your comfort zone straight into the thick of a book tour or a raft of craft fairs or Mothers Union talks. Try a list of what you feel you could do and aim to pick one item off every month. More, if you feel up to it. With the focus always firmly on the books - and where you are likely to find prospective readers.

My tete-a-tete daffodils are currently bursting into bloom and reminding me that those are the kind of trumpets I'm most comfortable with - but I've still got some targeted marketing to do!

I wonder how you get the balance right between book-promotion and self-promotion?

Dorothy Courtis writes crime novels with a Christian ethos and historical novels as Dorothy Stewart. She is based in north Suffolk.