It is quite clear to me as I go through this process of trying to get my book published that the business of creating a platform and selling myself is taking me as far away from the content of the work as humanly possible. The book is about creating a consistent state of well-being, a how to for living through our hearts and not our heads. I have spent the last 6 hours trying to figure out how to get hooked up with a thousand social media sites, 6 hours trapped in my head, so that someone will get to read about living from the heart. Selling the message in this technology requires that we spend our days trapped in our minds, staring into boxes on a screen, distracted, consumed, not present, tinkering with codes, passwords and the language of sales. All the tasks that publishing now requires: the social media, web design, pitch-writing, proposal-designing, self-promotion, the insane hours of work “about” the work, is preventing us from having any time to create, and ultimately, from making the world a better place. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but one could easily argue that forcing us to be “linked in” to this technological swirl is a good way to disempower us, and keep us from challenging the way things are. All this buzzing about, how we are going to sell nothing (because we have no time to create something), is in fact in the way of our actually saying something, or for that matter, changing the world. Gone are the days when the publishing houses and PR folks did their jobs. Now, as authors and artists, we are expected to do everyone’s job. We cannot just be a writer or an expert in our own field, we must become a one-woman geek squad, webmaster, flash executive, marketing director, and a PR and advertising creative as well. We are to tell the agents how to sell our book, the publishers how to market our book, the promoters how to position us. What is “their” job exactly? But most importantly, what are we learning through all this technological/marketing expertise other than how to be technology and marketing experts? Where is the space to work on the content that this technology/marketing is supposed to be selling? Once again, the monkey has scampered off and locked the scientist left in the cage. What is the solution to all this? Can we opt out and start conducting real conversations of content ever again? How do we get out of this terrible trap that we are in? Is there a way to return to the practice of creating valuable material/contents that can help us evolve as a society? I am in the process of figuring it all out… Stay tuned.
