"Sherlockian, Promote Thyself!"

Y'know, an introvert can fake extroversion, but inside the charade, does one ever actually change? 

One of the regular features of the Sherlockian Zoom meeting has become the open announcements segment, where events, club meetings, new offers, and general promoting can be done. And I avoid those like the plague. Not that I'm not doing things people might want to know about on occasion. I just don't want to talk about it. 

The reasons for promoting things is obvious: You want to increase the involvement or participation on a thing, be it selling a thing, getting attendance for a thing, or just trying to get people to know a thing exists. Increasing the numbers. But here's the thing . . . Sherlockiana is not a hobby that typically generates big numbers for deep dives. Sure, you can get a whole lot of people to watch a movie or TV show with Sherlock Holmes if it's well done. But how many people actually read an article about the types of Victorian pipe tobacco that Sherlock Holmes smoked in a particular pipe, no matter how cleverly it's written? You can't even go by circulation counts on that for a given journal or newsletter, as not every subscriber reads every article. It's not a number that gets many digits.

And the algorithms do not favor Sherlockiana, in an algorithm based internet.

Be niche enough, unique enough, and the searches may just find you. Or pretend to. There are ways to do such things, but is this hobby really so important it needs all that effort spent on pushing when you could spend the effort doing something you enjoy.

The thing is, after a time, you notice that we're all in a small pond where the biggest fish aren't that much bigger than the other fish. Sure, you can say "Oh, this celebrity from the world outside comes into our pond sometimes!" (Or a lot, if they're really cool.) And they can seem like a bigger fish in our small pond. But the pond is only so big. And a lot of fish in the pond are actually purposefully ignoring that parts of the pond exist, for whatever reason.

Sometimes it's enough to just let your friends know about something, because that's who you did it for anyway. Even introverts like their friends. The rest of humanity can just get annoying, and who wants to do customer service for those bits of humanity if they aren't getting what you're doing?

Of course, the flip side is that one could be nice and just let people know about a thing they might enjoy, even if you aren't looking for fame and fortune climbing Sherlock's coat-tails. And that's really the reason to promote a thing to fellow fans of the great detective. That's just being a good person.

Which one has to occasionally talk one's self into, even if it means writing a blog post to do it. 

Will I even post a link to this blog post on my own social media? We shall see.