If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I choose this photograph of me having fun sitting in the storyteller’s chair at the fabulous Telluride, Colorado, public library because I wanted to write this month’s newsletter about the power of silliness! (If you ever get to Telluride, don’t miss this amazing library!)

The power of silliness?

Yes, that’s what I meant to say.

I’ll illustrate with a story of something that happened this past month.

As all of you regular readers of the website know, I have two new books out this year. Tough Transitions came out in June and the paperback edition of A Sacred Primer will be out in September. The publication is exciting, and I am deeply grateful to Warner Books and Abingdon Press for believing in my work and making it available to the public.

And there are also months following publication that are tense and tough for any author. What can I do to let as many people as possible know about the books so they can make a choice about whether to buy or not? (“If people don’t know a book exists, how can they know whether or not they want to buy it?” This is the concern of all authors.)

The rub is that most of us authors are not marketing types. We don’t naturally think that way. The very nature of our personality that leads us to do such a solitary thing as spend years writing a book seems somehow incompatible with being smart, quick marketers. But all of us authors are aware in today’s market that we are expected to assist the publisher in every way possible to let people know about new books.

I can tell you personally that this post-publication work can almost paralyze me when I’m trying to think of what to do that is consistent with who I am and what I’m about in my life and that still shows collaboration with and support for my publishers. I can get so serious about this. So deep in concern that I don’t have the energy left even to do what I might think up to do!

Imagine my joy in reading an article in The New York Times a few weeks ago about another author who had similar concerns. John Wray had spent five years writing a new novel, “Canaan’s Tongue.” He desperately wants the novel to sell because he loves to write and wants to be able to write novels as his life’s work. So he decided to do something drastic to publicize his book: he went to Home Depot, bought materials, and built a raft! He and two buddies then got on this homemade raft to float down the Mississippi River. John’s idea was that he would pull up on the banks of the Mississippi from time to time and do a book reading. (The Mississippi River figures in the novel.) Well, according to the NYTimes article, the book signings have been pretty much a bust, but the float down the Mississippi has gotten a lot of attention. They’ve been almost run over; they’ve gotten stuck in mud; people have parked their SUVs on the banks and stood to laugh at them as they passed in their crude contraption of a raft.

What tickled me about this article was seeing the creativity to which this author went to let people know about his book and generate interest in it. It also told me how self-starting and creative all of us authors need to be! Whether it works or not! But I was glad to see the pictures and read the text that gave evidence that John had fun on this jaunt, even if his book signings didn’t draw a crowd (or anyone! at some signings.)

So I started being silly.

What could I do that was like building a raft and going down the Mississippi? Well, maybe I could sell cosmetics in homes and give my books away as door prizes! Maybe I could win a car with my sales and have plenty of room in the trunk to carry all my books around! My husband, some friends of ours, and I had great fun on July 4th weekend imagining all the things I might do to make my books known.

Although this was all jesting, the silliness had an amazing effect! When I got silly about this “serious” subject, I suddenly began to have some good ideas! One was so practical I couldn’t imagine why in the world I hadn’t done it decades ago since I’ve been writing books for a long time. I’d make a notebook that had a section for each speaking engagement or book signing I had where I would keep in one place all details for that event—who I was in contact with, where the event was located, when, what I needed to send ahead of time, etc., etc., etc. I know, this is so elementary. But, you know, I’d never done it before. And part of the headache of post-publication for me had been all the details, all the fragments I had to pull together, all the things I had to remember. These were usually in different folders in different drawers in different cabinets, sometimes in different rooms!

And the silliness also opened up new possibilities in my thinking. I decided I would enjoy all these events, focus on the people I’ll get to see again and the new people I’ll meet. I would think of places I’d enjoy going and then see how creative I could be about getting to that place. I thought of people I hadn’t thought of in years, people who were always welcoming in the past. The whole thing became much more exciting.

I won’t go as far as to say post-publication activities have become my favorite thing in the world, but I can say that the heaviness is gone. The seriousness of it all. Lightness is in! Fun is in! Creativity is in! (I even got silly with fabric for pillows for our front porch—grinning monkeys hanging from trees—and with cheap, tiny little animals my mother used to put in her flower pots: I put them out like art objects on our book shelf!)

Let us all celebrate silliness!

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Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.