With the advent of internet, the publishing world has changed forever. No longer you have to rely on the publishing houses to accept your work and publish it on your behalf. You can self-publish your work on a number of medium including your own books.
But that has also lead to another problem. You got to learn self-promotion. And most of us hate that.
I have become a big subscriber of Austin Kleon’s collection of therories on showing your work. Like him I believe in Steve Martin approach – “be so good they can’t ignore you”
In his book ‘Show Your Work‘ Kleon writes:
“If you focus your efforts on getting really really good at what you do, you don’t need to find an audience because they’ll find you. But at the same time as being waiting to be FOUND, you also need to make yourself FINDABLE. This is where ‘Show Your Work‘ comes into play; while you’re working hard at getting good, you should be sharing things along the way. By building in a process of sharing, you can start to engage with the ‘real world’ while you’re on your own journey. By generously sharing ideas and knowledge, people often gain an audience along that way that they may be able to leverage somewhere down the track.”
Here are the ariticle I have written on the subject.