It would be remiss of me not to mention that this also happened a week or two ago (I am honestly losing track of time and the massive alcoholic bender and pile of merciless-peppers-of-Quetzalacatenango-level hot wings did not help):

Surprise! Horrible, horrible surprise!

Raul, a new connection on Book Twitter and BookTube, was kind enough to use his channel to promote some independent authors by letting them pitch their writing. My attempt wound up in Part Two, but there is so much to check out on his channel aside from my embarrassing foray into video self-promotion. Highly recommended!

As I immediately noticed, I am terrible at making videos. I may have been aware of this one already, but the lack of an Edpool mask makes it even clearer that I feel as uncomfortable looking directly into a lens as I do looking into people’s faces when I talk. So that’s interesting. My manner, somewhere between good British self-deprecation and neuro-divergent lack of self esteem, doesn’t lend itself to “elevator pitches” either.

I also made it more of a bio, with a throw-away sideline about my entire body of writing (to be fair that was kind of the brief, and my books aren’t all connected for no damn reason) rather than making it about a single book or couple of books the way everyone else did.

Everyone else also all seemed to be universally really really good at making videos and talking about themselves in an engaging and fun way, with some real showmanship and production value going on. Check out Ben Roberts’s pitch in the same video I’m in! Ben’s another author who’s become a close e-quaintance of mine due to the #SPSFC, you’ll know the book he’s pitching because it’s one of the ones Team Space Lasagna put through to the semi-finals. Anyway, my point is, he’s good at this!

Me, eh. Not so much.

But that’s cool, I think my pitch still got the job done. I pushed myself a little and am putting non-zero effort in. And I did end up with a viewer who was intrigued enough to find her way to Edpool on Twitter despite the fact that there is no sane way to connect “Andrew Hindle” with my Twitter presence, because (again) I am terrible at marketing and branding and all that.

The whole ordeal also taught me that I should probably lean into my real-life presence a little more, too:

I also totally didn’t realise until now that Ben Roberts’s Twitter handle is @BenjaminJRobots. That’s hilarious.

All in all it was a very valuable and comfort-zone-poking experience. Just … let me recover for a while before we try again, okay? Let’s just snuggle.