THE BENEFITS OF BEING UNKNOWN, An Obscure Writer's Confession

For many decades, I have put considerable effort into finding an audience for my creative work, an effort that got started in the late 1960s when I began writing the first novel that I subsequently was to complete. By putting “considerable effort into finding an audience,” I mean that over the years I have sent the things I have written to many people and organizations in the business of helping writers reach wider audiences, such as publishers and producers as well as literary agents. This effort has earned me many rejections.

During the period, I have experienced many fallow or inactive periods as a marketer of my own works. Sometimes this inaction has been the result of carefully considered priorities. As a creative person, I want to give the lion share of my time to creating, not to self marketing. Self marketing takes a lot of time. It is the creating that I love and feel compelled to do. I don’t love marketing. At any rate, I don’t love marketing my own work.

Confession: I Was A Marketer

Since I am indulging in self confession, I had better quickly own up to the fact that working as a marketer is one of the ways I earned a living during a long career, recently ended. And so it may sound a little strange when I as this one-time marketer confess that I’ve never enjoyed being a marketer of my own work, and, of course, the record shows that it is an activity in which I have been a particularly poor performer.

Interestingly, during the early part of my career the job was called not “marketing” but “promotion.” Hence my very first full-time job in New York City in 1963 was as a “book promotion copywriter” for the book publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising business. The term “marketing” came into fashion only later.

Father’s Field: Promotional Sales

My father during a lifetime in sales including many jobs in which he originated many sales strategies —some might call them “sales gimmicks”--frequently referred to what he did as “promotional sales.” Today how Louis Saft earned a living would probably be called “sales marketing.”

On the other hand, I recognize that as a creative person I am not just creating for myself. No writer writes just for himself. I write to reach people. I write because I think I have something to say to my contemporaries and those who will come after. Hence as much as I don’t like self promotion or self marketing I have to do it. I recognize that fact. Otherwise there will be no chance that my work will ever get out into the world.

Despondency Over Past Rejections

My not sending out my work has been the result of carefully considered priorities, as I indicated, but it also has been the result of despondency over past rejection and fear of future rejection. I get no pleasure from having my work rejected. Having my work returned with a rejection note has often made me sad and feeling sorry for myself.

On rare occasion this sense of despair has led me to consider giving up writing, but then the fact that I would be walking away from something that I love, namely writing, has hit me square in the face. No, I can’t do that. That’s an unacceptable proposition. Tired of self pity, I have aroused myself with self-generated exhortations, exhortations that I will not quit, that I will keep on trying, that I will keep on writing as long as my brain still works and I have the energy to keep coming up with cogent ideas and startling images and the arsenal of sizzling words to express them.

Unencumbered by Expectations

Of late, I have even started seeing my situation as an unknown or obscure writer—to use a painful expression common in literary circles—as an advantage. As a writer without reputation, my audience comes to me with a clean slate, without preconceived ideas of who I am and what I stand for. If I have an axe to grind, they don’t know it. I am unencumbered by expectations—other than the assumed expectation that what I have to say will be presented clearly, with conviction and with a concern for the fact that many other subjects cry out for all of our attentions and that I as the writer, the creator, need to put some effort in keeping you, the reader, interested in what I have to say.

Because I am a blank slate to much of my intended audience, I don’t have to allow myself to succumb to an attack of nerves over whether I will live up to expectation or not. Will my intended audience find my latest work on a par with everything else of mine they have pored over with relish and in such huge numbers in times past? Having experienced my first rate murder mysteries, my wonderful fantasy thrillers, my engrossing memoirs, my Tony award winning plays, my Oscar winning film scripts, and my poet laureate quality poetry, will they come to my latest work with overblown assumptions?

Perhaps my past works have deserved such recognition, but the fact is I don’t have the credits to prove it. The vast majority of my intended audience come to my work with no such knowledge of who I am and all that I have previously written. I am fresh. I am new to them.

There is a freedom and correspondingly a sense of empowerment that can come from such a realization, and I need to try to keep that fact forever in my mind. I am free. I am stuck in no rut. I can say what I believe.

You can reach the writer at stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft