Until I met my husband, I never listened much to the radio. His family are huge fans of CBC radio and grew up with this station always on in the house. My family has Chinese television on all the time instead.
Looking for different ways of promoting my Kickstarter campaign, I stumbled across Dr. Wright, a crowd funding guru who has a web tv and radio website. She offered to do a quick interview with me for her radio podcast and I jumped at the chance. There was no equipment to set up, which was nice and all I had to do was call into her LA radio station. She had mentioned a few questions in her email so I wrote up answers for those, but in general I wasn’t sure what to expect!
It was a good experience overall as I learned a lot about what I didn’t know. Such as how to answer questions properly when the host improvises. I was really nervous, so that did not help things as I stumbled across my words like a drunken sailor. In general now I know that I have to think harder about what messages I want to convey for my book, including themes, unique characteristics, cultural matters, etc. My friend was surprised at all this. “You wrote the damn thing, you should know everything!” He admonished.
Writing is such a solitary, introverted activity that it feels odd to suddenly switch on an extrovert personality in order to explain what the heck you created. As well, growing up in an Asian culture, tooting your horn is a bad thing and you never want to draw attention to yourself because you will appear to be a narcissist. So generally, I find talking about my work and myself in a positive light hard to do as I grew up learning to do the opposite. My husband says I’m the worst salesperson in the world as he listens to me degrade myself after receiving any good comments on my work. He’s trying to train me to say “thank you” and not continue on to say anything bad afterwards, but it’s going to take a lot of effort on my part.
Here is the interview for those still interested, hopefully I’ll do better next time!
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wrightplacepodcast/2013/11/15/dr-wright-speaks-with-jf-garrard
Musings of a Generic Asian 