Self-deprecating self-aggrandizement

While writing The Camelot Shadow was a fun, fulfilling, and exciting process in and of itself, I'm finding that flogging something as personal as your own writing is a strange experience that requires a delicate balance between horn tooting and self-effacement--especially when you're self-publishing. In some ways, I feel like it's easier trying to sell someone else's work, or, say, a juicer ("It slices AND dices...how f#@$king genius is THAT!?). In that case, you get to be a convert to the cause, an enthusiastic champion swayed by the quality of the product ("I used to think that juice was just for nincompoops and right-handed people; turns out I've been wrong for YEARS--left-handed non-nincompoops can love it, too!"). When you're trying to hawk your own wares, it gets awkward--you want to tell people that it's really good, but without seeming arrogant, and you want to tell people that it's worth their time to read it, even if you're not entirely sure that's true. Let's go back to the juicer--if I'd invented one of those, at least I'd have something as objectively delicious as juice to show the quality of my creation. In this case, all I've got are some words strung together that may or may not make sense, and that will hopefully appeal to the small subsegment of the reading population that happens to dig Victorian settings, King Arthur, anachronistically semi-comedic banter betwixt characters, and way too many Scotch references. Wherever you are, I hope both of the people to whom that description applies are reading this.

Really, though, my only goal in this whole process is to not come off as an asshat (or, at least, to not come off as an asshat for the way in which I'm trying to promote the book; I accept that I'm going to come off as an asshat in life, generally speaking).