Self-Promoting Authors Anonymous

With apologies to the original, the Twelve Steps for self-promoters:

1. We admitted we were powerless over sales—that our careers had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that surrendering to a marketing machine greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity–our publisher's publicity department.

3. Made a decision to turn our books and our careers over to the care of the marketing department as we understand it.

4. Made a searching and fearless sales analysis of our self-promotional efforts.

5. Admitted to our readers, to ourselves, and to another author the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have marketing remove all these defects of shameless personal promotion.

7. Humbly asked our publicists to gloss over our marketing shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all the readers we had disappointed* and became willing to make amends to them all**.

9. Made direct amends to such readers wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were marketing ourselves again, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through blogs and other direct means to improve our conscious contact with readers as we understand them, asking only for knowledge of their will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a promotional awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other authors, and to practice these principles in all our impulses toward self-promotion.

*by promoting ourselves when we should have been writing

** by writing instead of trying to do the jobs of our publishers and their marketing departments

Hi, my name is Kelly, and I'm a self-promoting author.