Saturday, 10 February 2018

Anti-social Media


I am not a social media person. I don't have a Facebook page, or a twitter account, or Snapchat, or well anything unless you want to count this blog. That could be a problem because when you're trying to get people to read your book one of the obvious routes to take advantage of social media to reach out to an audience. The 'good news' for me is that it probably isn't going to work, unless you already have a huge following on Facebook, Twitter, etal, or you're a successful author simply looking to reach out to a fan base that wants to hear from you. Fundamentally trying to build a following to create potential readers of your work is probably not going to be a winning strategy. If you are looking to find readers for your work from a standing start the people I've asked about it have been fairly uniformly negative.

But suppose for a moment that wasn't necessarily the case, that you could with time and effort use it as a platform to simply market your work, the question then becomes, where does that time and effort come from? I work full time but I have generous lunch hour and my evenings are my own, which creates plenty of space to write. I know other people who aren't that lucky, work and family life eat up their free time and writing time is a luxury. When you don't have that much time to begin with it potentially comes down to a choice between writing and creating content simply to meet the demands of maintaining activity on a Facebook page or Twitter feed.

Add to that the question of what is that content going to be? How much creative energy are you going to pour into that endeavour that might otherwise go into your writing? One of the reasons I don't post more often in this blog is that I only do so when a topic strikes me that I want to write about, trying to come up with daily updates would be frankly wearisome.

Basically for a writer social media seems to be what you need to do if your successful enough to have fans to connect to and time enough to do everything.

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