I was reading Dean Wesley Smith's blog over lunch today and it so happens that his last two entries are about writers doing promotion.

Smith and his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch both write a lot of stuff about the business end of writing, which is intended to be helpful to new and independent authors. But one thing that Smith repeats early and often in most of his entries is that the best thing a writer can do with their time is to WRITE.

That sounds obvious. But in other places, Smith and Rusch both exhort writers to realize that they are businesspeople too. These latest entries are about the futility of promotion for a beginning writer. "Publishers promote, writers write," he says. When you are your own publisher, how much time should you spend, and what techniques are effective?

I was thinking about it in terms of being a young dentist, right out of school. I started off, for all practical purposes, from scratch. I rented space from a couple of young (about 6 years older than me) dentists and had no patients except for my family members and a few friends. What should I have done?

I know what I did do. I did some promotion. I took out a few ads in the newspaper, yellow page advertising, and I did up fliers and put them in mailboxes in the neighborhood I grew up in. I had announcements printed up and I literally went through the phone book and mailed to people that might know me. Teachers, people who I worked with at summer jobs, friends' parents, that sort of thing.

It was slow going. I eventually bought out those two dentists, took over their (failing) practice and built it into a decent business. Bought another business about 7 years later, and kept working. Kept "writing", though in this case "writing" was "treating patients".

But what about when I didn't have any patients? Well, you can't really make an analogy for this one. Because you need a patient to do dentistry, but you don't need anything except time and some ideas to write.

I think that maybe Mr. Smith is talking about putting too much time into promoting your one novel or your short story, at the expense of building up inventory. On the other hand, it doesn't take any time to make a Facebook post that you have a novel out there. Or tweet it (I don't tweet). Or if you're reading specific blogs, maybe occasionally mention that you are the author of TITLE. I found Steven M. Moore that way, and I'm enjoying his stories.

If you don't have a publisher to promote for you, then you have to take on the duties of that publisher, it seems to me. Just like early on, I had to take on the responsibility of doing some promotion for my practice.

Now things are different. Just today, I had a hole in my schedule and the emergency we brought in to "look at" ended up getting a crown done right then and there. Word of mouth. I'm good at what I do. Patients look for me, not the other way around now.

Readers look for Stephen King, too. But if there was self-publishing when he was starting, would he have just put Carrie in a drawer (or a waste basket) and gone on writing, or did he believe in his work enough then to try to get it out there in front of those readers?

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