Marketing and the split personality

So I’ve been working feverishly on a new project and neglecting the blog. It’s true. What’s the use of the blog, sometimes I think, when I should be working on the new project like an attentive new lover. I am a writer after all and 500 words here is not 500 words there. Marketing of course. I am smiling wryly now. Marketing. It has been so successful with my last book, with all the effort put into it and all, and to be told by a publishing executive that it was a nice effort, but not quite doing it for what they’d like to see. Wow.
So a marketing person, at the behest of a really really close friend of mine, took a look at what I maybe fucking up. And surprise! I have multiple web personas.
I am Jerry Mathes II. I am Jerry D. Mathes II. I am Jerry Mathes. I am Jerry D. Mathes. I am J.D. Mathes. I am a fractured personality and all of this while I’m thinking about changing my name and writing under a pseudonym for my fiction and a seriously revealing memoir (mostly to family and this could save them some trauma that they already haven’t suffered from the less than 100 readers of my last book. Seriously why bother?). Any who… A fractured web persona. I, at first, chuckled, as I am a fractured persona. And thought that this means I can never be a publishing success as I can never pin myself down as this one thing. Maybe like Bartleby the Scrivener, I choose not to. (Who am I kidding? I’d love to, but I can’t. I am incapable of that so I guess I’ll always be a literary loser in that sense). There is that rebellious thing in me that has served me so well in the past (note sarcasm at my folly. Self-delusion is not just a trait for fundamentalists and politicians) that I am right and all of them have it wrong. Maybe they are all wrong and betting the safe bet, betting there is no room for the writer who can’t self-promote and create a web footprint ahead of a contract or the small press author struggling away, are wrong. Some of us need outside help. A boost to help get our stories out there. We are out here. We are writing. We are spinning narratives that the public want to read.
Me? I can’t say for sure. We have a fractured personality and four of them are out of the loop and drunk and one isn’t even who I am. BUT We are all writing something that is not a press release.

3 Replies to “Marketing and the split personality”

  1. “Me? I can’t say for sure. We have a fractured personality and four of them are out of the loop and drunk and one isn’t even who I am. BUT We are all writing something that is not a press release.”

    Absolutely awesome. 🙂

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