Sunday, April 3, 2011

Blowing my own horn

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, an elder of mine (not a relation) - who often offered unsolicited advice about this and that - proffered that my bluegrass band was not as busy as it could be because we did not "blow our own horn" enough. I guess self-promotion must run against some of the values my parents instilled in me, because whenever I do it, some sort of guilty creepy feeling trickles down the back of my neck and deposits itself in my guts. I know for a fact that avoidance of that feeling kept me from capitalizing on many opportunities to sell my book. On the other hand, ignoring it brought me some wonderful opportunities. I would never have traded books with David Amram had I paid attention to my conditioning. Instead, I did the opposite (just like George Constanza in that brilliant Seinfeld episode) in a few instances and reaped some interesting rewards.

I was just checking my Sitemeter stats and realized that The Daily Beat is approaching 20,000 visitors (I started tracking visitors on October 25, 2008). That's pretty cool, I think. I haven't been posting of late as often as I did for the first year after my book came out, but I've been trying to average a post a week or even more. I noticed the other day that someone from Norway spent 24 minutes on The Daily Beat, and someone from the Tulane University server spent a few minutes as well. Perhaps they opened the page and went and made coffee (or got rid of coffee), but I can fantasize.

Anyway, I am wondering what kind of celebration might be in order for hitting 20,000. If you think of something cool, let me know.

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