The hardest part of writing is not writing books and short stories and blog posts, it’s trying to promote them.

This is a sentiment that many writers agree with.

Much of it has to do with the market. There are a lot of writers out there and tons of books, so it’s difficult to get noticed, even with all of the support of fellow writers who work together to lift each other up and cross-promote works. It’s also the economy. With these hard times too many people simply can’t spare the extra cash for things like books when they’re struggling to pay rent and buy food.

And the other problem is that I am not a marketer. I have no marketing degrees and apparently not much marketing savvy. I suppose I could hire a marketer or a marketing firm, but I am suspicious of a lot of the offers that come up. Many of them have the air of used car sales people about them, and I am wary of getting ripped off.

But I am trying my best to get something to go viral. I put up plenty of links on social media and online forums. I consistently try to find that one Tweet, the random blog post, that one Facebook post that will go viral, the one that will get lots of likes and shares and retweets.

For example I did post one novel excerpt from my current work-in-progress What the Hell Ever Happened to Yuri Rozhenko? It’s an excerpt with the titillating title The Horniest Lesbian in the World, a concept which is part of the excerpt.

The excerpt is a scene where a bunch of punk rockers are drinking beer behind a club before a show. The central character is a punk hobo named Onion. She’s not the main character of the work, but she is the main character of this scene. It begins with Onion asking her friends a theoretical question: Does a man weigh more if he has an erection?

Which pretty much lets you know the tone of the conversations. It’s very silly! The rest of the scene goes from there as the conversation topics cover bodily functions and genital debates until Onion gets around to her most pressing point, a legend about an incredibly sexy woman who is so gigantic she only lies in repose while people hike across her.

Honestly if it were a Monty Python sketch Graham Chapman would probably pop up and say “All right, that’s enough. This excerpt has become too silly.”

Eventually Onion starts talking about a legend that she, apparently, made up, as her twisted imagination came up with the saga of a woman who is tens of thousands of miles long and is waiting for someone to reach her clitoris, a part of her body which many people have failed to reach because of the treacherous journey required to reach it.

Basically Onion goes on to relate that the legend says that only the horniest lesbian in the world has what it takes to reach the storied clitoris. All in all, it’s just silly stuff that Onion comes up with off of the top of her head.

Many people talk about things like the weather, what their kids have been up to, or what kind of color they’re thinking about using for painting the bedroom, but in my travels and travails as a drunk and drug addled clubber many of my friends have engaged in quite alternative conversations. Sometimes we talk about literature, and other times we talk about art and music, and then we’ve had conversations like the one I’ve described. It’s like some of the conversation in the movie Slacker, such as do blue Smurfs portend the coming of Krishna?

I was a little self-conscious about posting this piece. The title does read like clickbait: The Horniest Lesbian in the World. But at the same time I thought to myself, who doesn’t want to read about the most oversexed dyke on the entire planet? When you actually read the excerpt, you realize the title refers to part of the story that’s not gratuitous, just really very silly.

I have gotten lukewarm responses to it. It has gotten likes and shares and retweets, but not so much more than most of my other blog posts and excerpts. I was rather hopeful that it’s salacious title might get it some more attention or controversy and help me attract more Twitter and blog followers and book buyers.

Which just goes to show how hard marketing is. A professional media marketer said that if you have any kind of content site, just keep throwing stuff up on it, because there’s no way to predict what will go viral and what will not. The more stuff you have out there, the more likely you’ll get just that right ping or punch that will make the rounds and take off.

And I just need one thing to take off. If it does, the rest will (should) follow!