Shameless Self-Promotion

What a florist taught me about writing, visibility, and the discomfort of being seen

Yesterday my literary agent gave me homework, and I’ll be honest, it was not the assignment I was expecting.

We were regrouping after my manuscript had recently been passed over by a publishing house despite making it surprisingly far in the process. I’d mentally prepared myself for the kind of feedback people brace for in those conversations. I was ready for edits, structural changes, and hard conversations about positioning. I came prepared to hear that the story needed more momentum, the market analysis needed sharpening, or the proposal needed to lean harder into one theme or away from another.

Instead, my agent told me to watch a nineteen-minute online module from a flower arranging workshop.

Yes. A flower arranging workshop.

I tried to sound open-minded while also internally thinking, Umm… really?!

Still, my agent is smart, experienced, and significantly more knowledgeable than I am about publishing, so this morning I pressed play.

The module itself was simple. It featured the owner of a floral business sitting in a chair in front of her beautiful shop talking about marketing and business strategy. The title was Being the Face of Your Business. I started watching with full skepticism. Nineteen minutes later, I found myself unexpectedly moved and slightly irritated by how much I recognized myself in what she was saying.

Her basic point was that her business didn’t begin to grow until she stopped trying to market her product and started sharing herself instead. Advertising flowers didn’t change her business nearly as much as letting people see the person behind the flowers. She talked about showing her face online, sharing her story, being visible, and inviting customers to feel connected not just to the arrangements but to the human being creating them.

At one point, she talked about the phrase “shameless self-promotion,” and then kind of pulled the phrase apart. “If you’ve ever heard the phrase shameless self-promotion,” she pointed out, “it already implies there should be shame attached to promoting yourself.”

That was the line that hit home because I realized that over this past year of sharing parts of my book process publicly, I’ve struggled with the feeling that openly wanting my book to succeed somehow felt self-involved or shameful. I can feel my discomfort even thinking about trying to “sell my book.”

It was somewhere inside that discomfort that I started to understand why my agent had sent me the video. The florist was technically talking about marketing, but her deeper point was that people don’t just connect to the thing you’re making. They connect to the person making it. When the florist described marketing as sharing herself vulnerably, nothing about it felt self-involved to me. It felt brave. She was talking about stepping out from behind her product and allowing herself to be seen.

Watching the video, I slowly realized that my discomfort had less to do with sharing myself and more to do with the fear of doing it in a way that felt performative or artificial. The more I understood that distinction, the more this very unexpected homework assignment made sense.

My agent’s job is, quite literally, to sell my book. And yet, I’m pretty sure she didn’t send me that video to teach me how to “sell” anything at all. She was reminding me that my job is simply to keep showing up honestly and prioritizing connection over performance, even as the process itself becomes more public and uncomfortable.

I’m grateful for the reminder because I don’t think I had fully distinguished promoting myself from sharing myself. Looking back at this past year of writing publicly, I can see that the moments where I shared myself most honestly were also the moments that created the strongest sense of connection. It turns out, I don’t need to promote anything. I just need to keep showing up.

For helping me see that, I have my agent (and, surprisingly, a lovely florist) to thank.