Thus wrote Ezra Pound to his parents, urging them to bang the drum for his new poetry collection among their friends and acquaintances. If I were willing to get a tattoo like everyone else, that’s the phrase I’d have inked onto my arm. Instead, I will quote at length from the New York Times piece “How Writers Build the Brand” by Tony Perrottet:

As every author knows, writing a book is the easy part these days. It’s when the publication date looms that we have to roll up our sleeves and tackle the real literary labor: rabid self-promotion. For weeks beforehand, we are compelled to bombard every friend, relative and vague acquaintance with creative e-mails and Facebook alerts, polish up our Web sites with suspiciously youthful author photos, and, in an orgy of blogs, tweets and YouTube trailers, attempt to inform an already inundated world of our every reading, signing, review, interview and (well, one can dream!) TV ­appearance.

In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought. And yet, whenever I have a new book about to come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention. Peddling my work like a Viagra salesman still feels at odds with the high calling of literature.

Tony Perrottet’s latest book, “The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe,” will be published this month.

Personally, I don’t feel like a Viagra salesman so much as an obnoxious child, jumping up and down, yelling, “Lookit me, Ma! Lookit me!” That sort of behavior was slapped down decisively in my actual childhood, so it feels awful now. And yet, as Mr. Perrottet says, it’s part of the job, and evidently always has been. His article goes on to give examples of shameless “literary whoring — I mean ‘self-marketing'” by Hemingway, Balzac, Woolf, Stendhal, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Simenon, Whitman, de Maupassant,  and Herodotus.

Unless you are Emily Dickinson, the price of maintaining a becoming modesty is obscurity.

So here I am, on the eve of Doc‘s publication, asking you to buy this book now, in hardcover. People can’t buy a book if they don’t know it exists, and if Doc makes the bestseller lists early, it gets additional media attention and publicity. Sales of this book will directly determine what happens to me next, as an author. Unlike Walt Whitman, I won’t write my own reviews, but if you like Doc, I’ll take it as a personal favor it you’ll spread the word any way you can. Thanks.