Dare to Be Cringe

I enjoy following author and creative Amy McNee on Instagram. In addition to sharing what she is writing or working on, she often shares thoughts and encouragement for other creators.

One concept she often discusses is “being cringe.” Sometimes this is in reference to the creative process itself: the risk in seeing how a vision might play out in reality. Maybe it turns out to be as wonderful as you saw in your mind’s eye, or maybe it makes you recoil due to how poor the idea or a specific execution of the idea ends up.

Amy also talks about being cringe when it comes to sharing what we’ve created with others. Due to the (d)evolution of social media algorithms, posting something once or even a handful of times is not likely to reach that many people.

In order to let a wider number of people inside and outside your circles know about what you’ve done, you’re going to have to post about it much more. And by “much more,” she means to the point where it might start to make you worry that you’re annoying others with how often you’re doing it.

If you’ve made something that you want others to know about (particularly if you hope to money), the best way to do it is to actually talk about it, share links to it, post pictures of it, and so on. And if the most popular sites aren’t going to make it easy for others to discover it, one will need to be persistent in order to make sure people see it.

I’ve become more comfortable this year in daring to be cringe. It used to be that I’d try to launch the hell out of a new book for the first month or two, and then hope for the best after that. This year I’ve changed that by going back and posting much more about all my books. Not only did I believe in each of them when they first released, but I still do, and so many people likely missed out on hearing about them during that small window of time. And the algorithms are clearly doing me no favors in helping spread the word, so it falls to me as the creator to keep letting people know.

So if you are a creator with your own frustrations or hesitations about self-promotion, I say take Amy’s advice and dare to be cringe. Share your work early and often. Make it weird. Because honestly, that’s going to be the way others hear about it.