My friend Lisa wrote a post this morning about coming up with an elevator speech — a short description you can share in the time it takes to move between floors in a lift — to describe her work as an artist and creativity coach.
That’s funny: I’d just read another post that said we shouldn’t use elevator speeches. I found the anti-elevator-speech article while hopscotching from a link in a tweet that was a retweet then following a link on a site… one of those WWILF (“What Was I Looking For?”) episodes.
Okay, I have to admit that my first reaction was…
(My author photo sucks, so I shouldn’t talk.)
Then I read the piece and took the point he was making: We should have genuine conversations with people, because nobody likes giving or hearing a canned litany.
Still, people do ask us creative folk “What do you do?” and it can be difficult to give an answer. Despite the advice to the contrary, I think it does help to find a concise and compelling way to talk about it that saves us trying to convey the entirety of the work or give an experience of it on the spot, which is pretty much impossible to do in those situations.
The question I get the most is “What kind of books do you write?” And the answer 99% of people are expecting is a genre category, because that’s what the corporate marketplace has reduced literature to. The problem is, I don’t write “horror” or “romance” or any other potted type of story.
I’m overhauling my whole approach to self-promotion right now, and in the meantime, to spare myself the agony, and to give people a taste of “Oh, a tiny handmade thing; this is possible?”, I’ve created a little leave-behind catalogue and FAQ for my books:
The big challenge, I find, with most of the advice about marketing and promotion is that it’s aimed at people who sell a product or service. So we’re told: “What do you do? Who does it help, and how?”, or, “What do you sell? How is it useful? In what situation?”
Of course, if your answer is “A dance” or “A novel”, or “A painting”, it’s pretty difficult to quantify the magic of the received experience — particularly when only certain people will perceive and connect with that magic (get lost in your book, be moved by the dance, connect with the painting, &c).
Oscar Wilde said that art must be useless; if it’s bent to a purpose, it’s no longer art. Yet we artists live in a market-driven world and have to justify our place in it. I suppose this stops us from crawling completely into our own navels — though I think anyone who’s worried about being too self-absorbed probably shouldn’t be worrying. In fact, most of us could probably go further and be more daring.
I dunno. I’m still going to advise authors to come up with an elevator speech, because having one helps keep the book focused while we’re writing it, and afterward helps potential readers find a starting place in understanding the book and whether it’s for them.
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