God alone knows when I’ll have time to return to this blog in earnest. I spent all day hacking away at Chapter 10 of Girl in Straw Hat, having realised that the existing dialogue, while sprightly and all that, made little sense psychologically. Changing such things is a mysterious and quite satisfying activity, but does leave you feeling a bit wabbit after six hours. If Jeeves were here I’d call for the beaker of the warm south or some such.
So perhaps today’s the day to deal with twitter and facebook as these bear on the self-publisher.
I’m not on twitter and certainly never will be. My (rare) excursions there reveal rather a dark place. If you want to be in a small room filled with people shouting (sometimes SHOUTING) how much they hate Donald Trump then you have found your home. And the best of luck to you and all who sail in you. As for me, I’ll sit it out, if you don’t mind: I’m a mild sort of chap and get anxious around angry people.
To come to the point, I don’t think twitter recommendations are a way of getting people to read anything. If you think about it, the very concept is a giveaway in that regard. I can offer one small bit of evidence. The truly wonderful Bookbag people invariably flag the fact that they have reviewed your book with a tweet. I think they have well over 20,000 plus followers. My experience is this has no discernable effect on sales.
Facebook is trickier. One needs a web presence and Facebook offers a way of getting it. The published evidence on whether it’s an effective way of getting people to read your books is uncertain. Having thought about it, I decided not to go down that route and to maintain my own website and blog. I point people to these whenever the opportunity arises. That way, I avoided falling into the Facebook maw (my mother explained to me long ago that nothing’s really “free”). Perhaps I’m a control freak, but I do like to feel I’m in control and that there’s nothing nasty going on behind the curtain. My recommendation is to set up a website. In either case you can only drive traffic with content people might want to read.
The bugbear is these things are hellishly time-consuming. I am amazed at the time people spend re-tweeting (I assume that means they’ve read and thought about what their fingers are endorsing). How on earth do they find the time? Once embarked on these electronic fancies you’re stuck with them. Neglect will exact a punishment more severe than not having the thing in the first place. So beware what you wish for.
At least once a week you need to see that everything is working, that links still work, that new material is added and so on. Whether the damned thing clicks or not, it is going to be a devil on your back. If you can’t maintain the site, it’s probably best to kill it altogether. Above all, avoid having entries like “Latest News: Catch me at such and such Festival, March 2009. I’ll be reading from my new book.”
This can be embarrassing.
Courage mes amis, le diable est mort.
Normal service will resume next week, if rewriting becomes less painful.
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