Self-promotion

I hate self-promotion. It feels gross, and it feels like I should be letting people come to me, and it feels like a huge imposition on all of my friends.

But there’s no way that I’m going to be financially successful¹ without telling people that I’m good at things, and that they should hire me. So I’ve been working on it.

It still feels crass. It feels like I’m taking advantage of my friends’ willingness to keep me in their lists, and I always assume that some people I care about have unfollowed my feed on Facebook.

To try and combat this, I’ve made a couple of Facebook pages — one for this blog and one for my sound/lighting self. Some intrepid folks have liked them, but definitely not enough to make a meaningful impact². I’m still not sure that a still-bootstrapping sound and lighting outfit is an appropriate entity to have a facebook page — very few people pay attention to who’s doing sound, and I don’t know of anybody who goes to events because of the technical crew (unless they have a personal connection).

So, I’m not sure what to do. I meant to stop crossposting blog posts to my main Facebook, but my blog page doesn’t have a large audience. I have a page sitting around that says Living Tradition Sound & Lighting, but no use for it, no content to publish, and no reviews.

Of course, I’ve also been working at getting gigs in the more personal way — I schmooze with friends, network at every gig I have, and have taken up cold-emailing event planners and venues asking them if they need an engineer. I’ve got a few gigs this day, but nowhere near enough to feel comfortable. I can survive off of income from Good Good Work, but not comfortably.

Freelancing is hard, and it sucks, and I don’t recommend it. Alleviate my pain: hire me to do sound and/or lights.

unrelated to this post: god fucking damn it Sweet Crude is so good hnnnnng