>In my view the Gold Standard for promotion is not self-promotion or paid promotion. It's the elusive word-of-mouth promotion done on your/the work's behalf by

>In my view the Gold Standard for promotion is not self-promotion or paid promotion. It's the elusive word-of-mouth promotion done on your/the work's behalf by complete strangers telling their friends about you/it and encouraging them to go check it out. My evidence for this is based on the number of downloads of my books from Apple Books, Google Play and similar online venues over the past 10 years. It's an impossibly imposed elitist standard on someone who is unknown to get to the point where word of mouth sustains them. It's a very Marie Antoinette attitude. No one reaches that level without self promoting as well, they just secretly use veiled methods like botting, the buddy system, and paid advertising to get there. Each person involved in promoting themselves has a different product, service, or goal involved in their work. A resume is self promotion that is unavoidable in finding work. I think if the truth was to be told properly, it's mostly people who have audiences already, people who own a stake in platforms, and wealthy/popular people that want to protect their dominance that are pushing the "anti self promotion" campaign, so that they don't have to compete against undiscovered talent. When people are forced to veil the promotion of their work, it makes it very easy to use negative and controversial tactics like psychological manipulation, disinformation, racism, sexual suggestion, and many other negative tactics to promote their work and products as well. It destroys integrity of art and business because accountability is not upheld by nature in the process. For example, many music artists are literally posting triggering content and exposing themselves in posts just in hopes of developing their user base, and that's why doom and gloom trends so often on social media now, because of the convoluted state of things. Many artists buy social accounts that already have followers on them, and they enlist promo services for bot views on their music videos... Veiled promotion only encourages corruption and deception in my opinion. The platforms themselves should be the ones managing and equally promoting undiscovered creators and contributors (as they often promise on sign-up), but they don't do it at all without being paid.