Fairly easy for Bill or the Dwarf Fortress brothers to have that stance after they've already gotten "lots of approval from others", i.e. their work has found p

Fairly easy for Bill or the Dwarf Fortress brothers to have that stance after they've already gotten "lots of approval from others", i.e. their work has found plenty of fans. If their work didn't have anyone enjoy it, well first of all we wouldn't know who they were to use them as examples, and also I bet they'd be struggling with their 'no blatant self-promotion' stance, or probably wouldn't even keep it. If my work already had the reach of either of those people I'd probably wouldn't bother with self-promotion either (because I dislike doing it, ideally I'd just like to throw stuff over the wall and whoever likes it will easily find it, but I know it doesn't work like that anymore). I got lucky with one of my video games, Proximity, that I barely self-promoted but others liked it enough to promote it for me (front page of Newgrounds.com way back, got stolen and added to a ton of Flash game sites without my involvement back in the day, which was the norm for Flash games back then). I failed to nurture that, and now probably very few, if any, people are playing the game, despite it being a game that was played millions of times as a Flash game 12 years ago, and the sequel being one of the first eight games demoed on Xbox Live Indie Games platform and got played a bunch of times there too. It possibly could have been almost the next Tetris in the hands of someone better at self-promotion than I am, but it didn't, and it's now pretty much forgotten, and most likely will shortly after I'm dead. And I've been kind of stuck with trying to determine what the next version should be like, what direction to take it, and finding the time and energy to work on it. I very well could die before a new version even gets released. Really doesn't help that all platforms it was released on are no longer around (Flash, Xbox 360, and iOS but ancient, would take too much work to update it). How do you determine when self-promotion is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for physical gain? My wife sincerely wants to be able to quit her day job and make her living writing books, and has spent twenty years not even being able to finish a book, and only this past couple of years figured out what works for her to start getting these things made. She also wanted to make it as good as she could, so she's dropped probably over a thousand dollars on various things including editing and proofreading, so it would be nice if at the very least she makes that money she invested into the book back, which she wouldn't have been able to do with zero self-promotion (that's not how Amazon works, she would have sold very few books, there's too much other crap out there).