I swear this is all Mark Charan Newton, Lee Harris & Paul Cornell’s fault. I attended their frankly awesome panel on social media at Alt.Fiction
One of the things that came up was whether you should be promoting yourself as an unpublished writer, and the answer came back yes.
Now, I’m not exactly unpublished, and have had the adrianfaulkner.com domain for several years but have never done anything with it other than set up a couple of test web pages. So recovering from my long day on Sunday, I set to work on redesigning it.
There was part of me that felt quite pretentious doing it. “Hey, everybody, come and look how little I’ve done!” However, the message that you have to market yourself these days came over loud and clear at Alt.Fiction. I had to do that for A-F (and did it quite successfully) so trying to repeat that with “brand Adrian” feels like a bit of an adventure.
But, at the same time, I’d been collecting images for my bibliography for a while now and putting that all together made me realise that maybe the website wasn’t such an ego trip after all.
Who knows? This writer’s mantle still feels a little odd to be wearing, even after all these years, and there’s been a lot of discussion on hype this past week all over the internet which has made me feel uneasy. I just have to tell myself, I’ve been here before, this is nothing new, just different, so I shouldn’t be entering into it with trepidation.
I’m convinced this is all about confidence. Enjoy the site!