Gak! Fr@!g! Sh*g!

That’s basically my reaction to Marketing. Any kind of marketing. But especially the stuff I do am supposed to do to sell my writing.

I have been reading about branding. What is this shit? I am not a tin of peas! Branding is when you take a product there are billions of similars of and stick some sort of ‘identity’ on top. A label.

The thing is, creativity IS the thing. It shouldn’t need a label, or an author a brand. Writing is what it is. There are already genres enough to confine and constrict – yes, they can and do. People struggle to hashtag their novels or find suitable keywords to fit if their novel crosses genres. Agents reject submissions on the grounds that your sci-fi/horror/comedy/etc isn’t close enough to the last sci-fi/horror/comedy/etc success they were involved with. What’s the ‘typical’ word count for the genre you write? Go ahead and look it up – I’ll wait…

And you wrote under or over it didn’t you? You worry that you now have to chop it up or tack on something else. I’m betting you looked around a few sites till you found one that fit closer to your word count. Who the f*ck decided this? Who got to decide how short or long your book should be?

And more importantly.

Why are we listening to them?!

I have a proposition – writers of the world unite and throw away all the rules (not grammar rules, that would be wrong, and very silly). Ignore what the publishers, agents, talking heads and ‘experts’ (I feel like Doctor Evil with so many ‘air quotes’) tell you!

Write from your heart. Write whatever you want. Write any and every genre and confuse the fuck out of your current agent, if you have one.

Be free! Don’t let anyone tell you how many words you should write. Or where you should promote yourself. Or how many times a day you should post on social media.

To misquote some bloke who drank a lot – Rage, rage against the pressures of the publishing industry!