Social networking for authors: pros and cons…
Book signings, book fairs, and book clubs take second place for today’s authors. While those three activities still offer some face-to-face possibilities locally and nationally (if you have the money to travel and the time), the internet has to be number one for any author today, whether indie or traditionally published. (I’m discounting the Hugh Howeys and Andy Weirs, who started as indie, and all the old stallions and mares in the Big Five’s stables, who probably have a staff to do their social networking.) This is as it should be. The internet allows us to reach out to millions of readers and chat with more readers and authors than we would ever meet in the old days. But social networking in particular and the internet in general have their pros and cons.
Some days ago, I was working on a novel and needed a bit of background. While I’ve traveled a lot in Europe and South America (probably more than in the U.S., if you discount work-related travel where long trips and long meetings ended in margaritas and exhaustion), I’ve never been to Scotland, which is still part of the U.K. The closest I’ve been is to Ireland, which is NOT part of the U.K. (in fact, 2016 is the centenary year of the Easter Rising, which led to Irish independence). But one of my characters had just inherited a castle not far from Edinburgh, basically an old stonewalled house in disrepair (think James Bond’s place, Skyfall, but on a smaller scale). I needed travel-like info from the internet so I could take my readers and myself there, thanks to the invitation from my character.
What happened was annoying. Sure, I found the info I was looking for. After an hour or so, I had more than I needed, in fact, because a Google search will give you opinions from ordinary people like you and me who have been there and can provide personal stories that go far beyond the travel brochures. Fine and dandy. I do this a lot. You’ll have a hard time in a book determining whether I’ve been to a place or not. I could make an error, but that error could stem from a fallible memory as well as a bad interpretation of internet info. What happened has happened before: I almost immediately started receiving ads about travel in Scotland! (I say “almost immediately” because they started coming through before I could close the browser.)
Some people might argue that someone has to pay for that service. By selling ads, the ISPs who manage the browsing services are making the advertisers pay for my free sessions on the internet. Not a bad deal in theory. It’s like all that “free” network TV. Viewers are moving away from that, paying for their Netflix and other streaming video services directly. For the internet, we think we’re getting all those goodies for free, but we’re paying companies like Comcast and FIOs to link to the outside world. And we’re making other companies rich to get our smart phone links. The operative acronym here is TANSTAAFL—“there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!”
The annoyance continues when you start using those “free” social networking sites. Besides the annoyance from unwanted ads (LinkedIn even warns you now that you have to let its cookies ruin your day), you’ll find annoying people. I still value the many friends I had on Facebook, but I arrived at a point where I couldn’t stand all the narcissistic jackasses and other people with causes ranting on their soapboxes. I generally have a thick skin, but why waste my time? I tried to get around this stuff by creating groups, but that took even more time. And FB even stopped letting me share my blog posts. While I still have my author page there, I can only indicate a summary of the blog articles each week. I also discovered that those famous FB ads are worthless to small businesspersons like me. Now I prefer Goodreads to FB…and that’s where the readers and authors are anyway, not lost among the many other millions on FB.
I’ve had a similar evolutionary awakening with Linked In. It’s a business oriented site of course—you don’t make friends, you make connections or contacts—but I’ve only used it because there were some good discussion threads on the writing business. While I’m a lurker, I occasionally speak up. I guess LI didn’t like that. First, they opted to limit the length of comments. I got around that by continuing the comments, one section after the other. Second, they started censoring. OK, I’m an indie author, but I don’t suffer fools gladly. When someone extols traditional publishing and speaks nonsense, I speak up. No more, I guess. Goodbye LI (sounds like a snippet from a song lyric).
The evolution continues: I’m trying an online forum now called “Indie Authors Cooperative” as a replacement for LI. IAC is a lot more focused than LI, which deals with many other businesses beyond writing. (I suppose I’ll still get job offers for writing gift cards or software manuals for company X, or endorsements from contacts that I never return—how can I endorse someone if I’ve never tried what s/he is pushing? And, if all those people who endorse me read my books, I’d have a lot more sales. I’m not cancelling LI, just becoming inactive.) Using IAC involves a learning curve, of course. So far I’m impressed by the people there. (Note: one of my beta-readers, Scott Dyson, who’s also an author, recommended it to me. I never would have found it otherwise. Thanks, Scott!)
I haven’t even touched upon datamining yet. I only need to say that sites like FB, LI, and many others participate, and so do companies like Google, Microsoft, and others whose names aren’t as well known. This isn’t annoying up front because it’s all done in a stealthy fashion. It’s so prevalent that a single individual like Snowden can’t expose it. It’s amusing that people scream about government surveillance when every time they log on, their activity is being monitored and recorded by dataminers who sell their findings to other corporations so they can target you. At times, it makes me want to become an internet hermit by isolating my computer from the rest of the world.
As an author, that’s pretty much impossible. As an indie author, it is impossible. Indie authorship and the internet go hand in hand—they’re like Siamese twins with conjoined brains. To sell books, I need to reach out to millions of readers in the hopes that I will entice a few readers to discover me and read my books. But there’s more. There’s absolutely no way I could have so many friends and work with so many people in geographic locations without the internet. I guess I’ll just have to muddle along. I can’t call the internet my friend, but a lot of people I meet there are friends. And that’s what counts.
***
May Day Sale. Mary Jo Melendez invites you to a Kindle Countdown Sale. Her stories, Muddlin’ Through and Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By, will be on sale from April 29 through May 6, $0.99 each, reduced from $2.99. That’s a lot of spring and summer reading for only $2.
In libris libertas….
