A thought-provoking essay at Her Kind, “Living in Parenthesis,” by Cris Mazza, discusses the outsourcing of just about everything to the writer in a literary world that increasingly blurs the lines between selling your work and selling yourself. After meeting with an agent who tells her to cultivate an online presence, Mazza’s student notes:
[read more]“What I find objectionable about that style of self-promotion is that it’s like you have to build a character out of yourself. You can’t blog something like, ‘Didn’t sleep well last night. Wrote a little. Will go buy a new broom now,’ because then your would-be readers think that you’d be dull at parties. You have to be fun! And quirky! Because that’s the only way to get the following before the book, right?”