During a recent, packed-out Q&A session at a literary festival in his hometown of Lahore, Mohsin Hamid, author of the bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist, trod the fine line between self-promotion and maintaining his humility perfectly.
He said he never reads reviews, adding that writing was like dancing in public, and that "if you knew what people were saying about your technique, even it was good, you would choke, become self-conscious and lose your spontaneity". Swoons all round.
Say whatever you like about his writing, but it is almost unanimously acknowledged that Hamid is a thoroughly sound and pleasant man who wears his literary triumph lightly, and he managed to ride the wave of adulation with genuine self-effacement.
But go to Twitter, and his timeline tells a very different story. The man is a monster. Not only does he appear to very much read his reviews, he also tweets them constantly, sometimes even selecting choice quotes from reviews: "Pakistan's F Scott Fitzgerald"; "The best book you'll read in 2013!"; "Like a role-playing game Tolstoy might have written" (given how much praise Tolstoy received during his lifetime, I can only imagine what a nightmare he would have been on Twitter).
Send him a compliment, and you are almost guaranteed to receive a retweet. So relentless was the onslaught, that last week an incredulous follower asked whether he in fact ran his Twitter account himself – something I, too, had wondered, so dissonant was its tone with his real-life performance. Hamid responded that he did: "Cringeworthy I know! But I am on a book tour". .
Most of us expect writers, especially novelists of a certain stature, to be , ascetic, lofty creatures, occupied with the intricacies of the human condition – which explains our surprise when they turn out to be hardnosed publicists seeking to maximise book sales by promoting their product as aggressively as one would push a new shampoo.
A distinguished British author and historian recently told me in a private conversation that his publisher had forced him to go on Twitter in order to promote his latest book. Having joined just for this purpose, his timeline was an unbroken litany of self-aggrandisement. He soon realised that the constant promotion was backfiring, and that his "brand" was being tarnished as followers were beginning to snipe at his hitherto exalted status. Indeed, the whole exercise was creating the impression that he was a pompous bore whose brash self-promotion did not match the profundity of his work – but he did not know how to rectify that.
And what about Salman Rushdie? The winner of the Booker of Bookers, who's able to capture the most subtle and elusive of human sensitivity, still frequently tweets cringeworthy and self-promoting material (he recently tweeted a picture of all his books rendered in chocolate cake form, humblebraggingly calling it "an improvement"). Shortly before that, he also unblushingly retweeted a link that called him "the most important writer of our time".
Meanwhile, Naseem Taleb, who is often cited as one of the top intellectuals of our time, trawls Amazon tweeting five-star reviews ("provocative, original, infuriating") and Paulo Coelho, the most unworldly of all, searches for tweets about The Alchemist, and reposts complimentary ones.
At the other end of the spectrum are writers like Nadeem Aslam. In a similar Q&A session with his fans at the Lahore festival, he – perhaps cannily – told of his seclusion from the vagaries of the publishing world. "What is Twitter"? he claims to have asked his publisher, when urged to go on in order to promote his book. His naive befuddlement doesn't seem to have harmed his sales; if anything, it has enhanced them.
Literature is a commodity, but can't be marketed as such. Writers need to either acknowledge this and assign themselves a PR detail, or refrain from unleashing themselves on Twitter if they lack the skills to operate it – a book is too inextricably linked to its author to be promoted flat-footedly and without nuance. That said, it can be done. Here are my tips:
• Do tweet events, book signings, public readings, links to interviews etc
• Don't exclusively tweet about your work
• Have a personality. Develop a character and a Twitter profile that is not merely a bludgeon wrought of your own brilliance
• Don't retweet compliments. Ever. Not once
Failing that, walk away from Twitter. Take the advice of Bret Easton Ellis's friend, who reportedly told him at the Vanity Fair Oscars' party: "You need to get off Twitter. People think you're crazy".
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