As someone who has no problem promoting and selling *other* people’s work in my rent-paying advertising writing, I think resistance to proactive promotion may be based in an innate shyness about one’s own work. I think this is often the case here in Australia and in the UK…could this also be so in the more extroverted U.S. culture? I personally have this feeling of ‘job done’ when I have finished a book or short movie and maybe a lack of self-confidence about the work itself, which if I were contracted with a major publishing house is exactly the point when a publisher, agent, studio or other marketing third party would have stepped in.

–Neal Vaughan