Janine's Reviews > Firefly Magic: Heart Powered Marketing for Highly Sensitive Writers

I’m an INFP and in real life, I fit into what Lauren Sapala calls a Highly Sensitive Person, or a HSP. These people tend to be more sensitive and connect to people in an emphatic way more than most than the population. To be honest, while marketing and selling myself and my books didn’t sound like a complete slime ball thing to do, it felt a bit pushy/slimy in that I had to change myself to be more extroverted in order to get sales and detached to my audience with loud and over the top promotion. I’m planning to take a lot of steps in 2019 to get myself out there, so this book came at the right time for me. The prose itself is very easy to read and I got through it in a few hours with a skim read, not thinking about it super deeply, though I’m planning to read it again to get the full experience out of the book.

Sapala integrates her own experiences with some thoughts about marketing in general as each chapter covers a different topic in an easy to read/digest way, with exercises to do at the end of the chapter to bring it home. Sapala’s personal stories really bring some of the lessons home as she tackles the typical and (some) outdated principles of marketing. Authors don’t have to play the marketing game like it’s back in the pre internet days where it was about competing with every other product out there and trying to beat them all. Or chase the current Amazon marketing trend of the week, which is probably outdated by the time you read about it. Or copy someone else’s personality or tactics to succeed or find an audience. It’s about being vulnerable and grabbing people in your own way and being compassionate to others as you connect to them. And the tips given are all practical, no complex steps needed, though some do take some time to implement. It connects the most to INFJ’s, INFP’s and HSPs writing books, but I think anyone can take home some of these tips to market themselves in a more effective and satisfying way and dispel some of the myths that are out there.

As a side note, while not referenced in this book, The Pursuit of Perfection: And How It Harms Writers by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is another book to look at based on Chapter 3 of Part III of the book (third chapter from the end), as it hits on the myth of needing perfect stories, especially in a world where there are millions of reading options, as compared to even 30 years ago where it was just bestsellers and little else.