Identity and Advertising

One of the requirements for getting people to notice what you write these days is that you establish an on-line identity. This is what the publishing industry calls an "author's platform". The basic idea is to have some kind of on-line social media presence that people can relate to in some way. Actually, that's partly what this blog is about. I've also obtained a Twitter handle, am in the process of setting up a Web site and of course I have an email address. I drew the line at Facebook, though. I've never been comfortable with their privacy policy, and even though they've improved it a lot, I still don't like the idea that they get to sell my personal data to advertisers without my say-so. I might join Ello instead, they have an excellent privacy policy - they promise to never sell your data - which they back up with a charter as a public benefit corporation thereby making it legally binding. I guess I don't have much of a problem with all this, I've operated on-line for most of my professional life in high tech, and am comfortable with it.

I'm having more of a problem with advertising, though. In principle, I like many other people find advertising to be an annoyance regardless of the medium in which it appears. I was pretty much OK with the discrete Google ads that showed up in search results 5 years ago, since often I was looking for something to buy and something showed up that was exactly what I was looking for. Nowadays, Google has become an something of an advertising superpower, with servers that slurp up data from everybody and sell it to the highest bidder, who then throws up ads that follow you around for the next three months. So I feel somewhat conflicted about buying advertising for the book.

But that is exactly what I've done. I bought a small ad in the Spring issue of Tricycle, and I'm planning on running a one month campaign on their Web site. It felt kind of funny creating the ad, kind of the ultimate narcissistic exercise in a way. Why did I do that? Well, I would expect people who read Tricycle would be highly interested in the book, and they might otherwise not get to know about it. So it was an extension of the whole (I cringe to call it this) marketing program for the book. The cost was reasonable, and Tricycle is a great magazine so I'm happy to support them through my advertising dollars, even though they've turned down my stuff in the past since they seem only to publish well known Dharma teachers and authors. I also contemplated taking out ads in the other two professional Dharma publications that run them but decided not to, partly because it felt weird enough running the ad campaign in one publication, and also because I figured that since Tricycle reaches the largest audience, I could probably reach enough people through that. Also, there was the additional cost.

An advertising campaign is something the publisher would run if I were to have run the book through a traditional publishing house. I tried a couple, naturally all I got was rejection letters, and I am not about to employ an agent to flog my writing to the publishers for me. So I've been going the self publishing route, and that involves the entire suite of activities including developmental edit, copy-edit, production, marketing and distribution. Some of this needs to be paid for, some of it you get for free if you epublish, which I'm doing. I decided to self-publish because I thought the message I was trying to convey with my book could not wait. Mindfulness and meditation is becoming trendy, and even though most people won't experience any problems with it, still there is the possibility that it could go wrong for some of them. Most meditation  teachers never, ever talk about this. One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I thought it was about time someone did, and I wasn't about to wait around until some publisher decided they wanted to take a risk on it. So that means I need to get the message out about it however I can.


Ultimately, Buddhism is about dis-establishing an identity, getting rid of the feeling of self-as-thing that makes so much trouble in the world. But I'm trying not to get attached to this new identity I'm creating on-line. Naturally I'm hoping the book gets lots of downloads, lots of people reading and discussing it, and that the messages I'm trying to convey gets through to lots of people because I think these messages could help people's practice enormously. The reality is though that publishing has become so easy and there are so many people writing that the sheer volume of books available is likely to overwhelm my small and relatively insignificant contribution. So I'm perfectly prepared if, a year from now, my contribution just shows up as a blip in the download stats of the ebook retailers' Web sites.

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