Stop pitching your work and start telling your story

For Writers Who Hate Self-Promotion

I recently attended a Zoom workshop given by Jennifer Mrozek Sukalo on how to talk comfortably about your work—your writing, your art, your book—without feeling like you need to sell yourself. I went in feeling hopeful and a bit skeptical.

The advice was surprisingly simple. And surprisingly hard. Instead of crafting a pitch, she asked us to consider a few deceptively straightforward questions:

• Who is your audience?

• What do you actually do?

• What makes it different?

• Why does it matter?

If those questions make you want to reorganize your desk instead of answering them, you’re not alone. Most writers would rather revise a paragraph ten times than say out loud why their work matters.

This is how I answered those questions

I write fiction about complicated grief, anxiety and overthinking. I explore what happens after the big catastrophe, the breakup, the death, and after life didn’t go as planned. I write about people who think too much, feel too much, and survive anyway. I write about outsiders who don’t feel as if they fit in.

I also write essays that blend wit and ache and offer humor as a pressure valve. I work to create community around vulnerability without melodrama. As a person, I want to model what it looks like to keep making art after devastation. I strive to give language to emotions people struggle to articulate.

What Happened When I Tried This Instead

She suggested we think about:

• Your struggle

• Your pivotal moment

• Your transition to now

When I started working through this, I didn’t begin with my either of my books, I began with a memory.

I was the kid who talked too loudly, said the wrong thing, and misread social cues. One time, I started screaming really loud at recess just because I could—and genuinely thought my friends were impressed. Well, they were stunned, but not in a good way.

As I grew older, I swung hard in the other direction. I tried to edit myself before anyone else could. I watched the reactions of other people, trying to pick up clues. It’s an awful way to live, wondering what horrors might pop out of your mouth.

I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until adulthood, but by then I knew what it felt like to be out of sync with the world.

Somewhere in that exercise, I realized I’d been trying to explain my work from the outside—genre, themes, plot—when what people really respond to is where my work comes from. My writing didn’t begin as a plot idea. It began as experience, as in my discomfort, my overthinking, and trying to understand the world and my place in it.

That was my story.

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This shift in thinking really works

After I distilled this into a thirty-second answer for when someone asks, “What do you write about?” I actually got the chance to try it. The other day I was tidying the racks of sweaters and jeans with the new manager at the Clothes Closet where I volunteer. We were making small talk, the way you do when your hands are busy. At one point she asked, “So what do you write about?”

Normally, I would’ve defaulted to genre or plot. Instead, I told her the story behind the work, screaming on the playground, ADHD, feeling out of sync and the way we edit ourselves to fit.

She didn’t nod politely and then change the subject. Instead, she shared something about her own life, and a real conversation followed. We found common ground and our conversation took on meaning.

That’s when I understood the shift. I wasn’t “selling” anything. I was inviting someone into a conversation. Instead of promoting my book, I opened a door. And that feels different.

If you’re a writer who struggles with self-promotion, maybe the issue isn’t confidence. Maybe it’s that you’re trying to market instead of connect. This exercise helped me see the difference.

Here’s a TikTok video of me practicing my personal pitch, bloopers included!

If you’re curious about Jennifer’s work, you can find her at SwaggerU and learn more about her book Claim Your Swagger. She offers thoughtful guidance on how not to sabotage yourself, and how to talk about your work without losing your voice in the process.

And if you write your own pitch, I’d love it if you’d share it with me!

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Thank you for visiting! If you’re a new subscriber, this newsletter is for writers and readers of good books who appreciate honesty, humor, and connection. I work to create community around vulnerability without melodrama. I model what it looks like to keep making art after devastation.!

My upcoming novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is about an anxious overthinker whose fixation on a stranger pulls her straight into chaos, heartbreak, and the inconvenient unraveling of her carefully constructed life. It’s funny and it’s not.

The overthinker’s name is Serenity and she really needs to claim her swagger.

Preorder the book and I’ll be forever grateful. Preorders help books get noticed. They signal demand to publishers and bookstores, which leads to wider distribution and more visibility.
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