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Avoiding Selfishness: Promoting Others During Challenging Times

{Guest post from Charlotte Riggle}

This year, sales and promotions are hard. There’s a pandemic going on. In-person events are canceled. There are no book signings, no holiday bazaars. People are worried about their jobs, or they’ve already lost their jobs, so they don’t have money to spend. It’s really tempting to do one of two things:

• Give up
• Become selfish

If you give up — that’s pretty obvious, what I mean by that. You just decide that nobody is buying books this year, nobody’s going to read your blog, so you make yourself a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of cookies, and you think about something else. And maybe you need to do that for an afternoon, or a day, for your sanity. But it’s not a good long-term strategy.

So, what do I mean by “being selfish”? That’s when you put all of your energy into promoting your own books, or blogs, or whatever you do. You quit thinking about other people. You quit listening and spend all your time talking. You join 100 groups on Facebook, and the only thing you ever post is about yourself and your books.

Tweet: When you put all of your energy into promoting your own work, you quit thinking about other people. It’s time to change that habit. #BeTheGood @MCChildsBookDay

And that’s not a good long-term strategy either. People start scrolling past your posts. They quit answering your texts. They’re tired already, from the pandemic, and politics, and life. And you’re just making more demands on them.

So, what can you do instead? Start putting less time into trying to be successful yourself, and more time into helping others succeed. That’s what Multicultural Children’s Book Day is about. The people who started MCBD all have their own books out. But they’re not here to talk about their books. They’re here to talk about YOUR books.

And you can do the same thing. Promoting other people’s books, helping other writers and bloggers, without the expectation that they’ll help you in return, but because you’re committed to helping others — it’s powerful.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

Zig Ziglar said, “You will get everything in life that you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.”

Ari Kaplan said, “People think self-promotion is about yourself. It has nothing to do with promoting yourself. It’s about promoting others and let that speak for your character.”

When asked what it takes to sell more and achieve more, Thom Singer said, “Many mistakenly think the answer involves special skills, mysterious business plans, and a lot of luck. The truth is it is easy. Simple. I mean so simple it is nutty. Help other people.”

And that’s what we’re all here for–to help each other.

If you’ve never thought about promoting your books by promoting others, you may be wondering what it looks like. It looks like sharing links to other authors on your social media. It looks like reviewing other people’s books on your blog. It looks like figuring out what parents and teachers and librarians need right now and helping them get that, even if they don’t buy your books. It’s doing for others what you’d want them to do for you.

That’s it. That’s how we’ll all succeed: by lifting each other up, serving others, loving others.