If you’re an author keep in mind you can start blogging anytime – you don’t have to wait till your book comes out! The earlier you start the conversation on your blog the more you’ll be able to build community. One of the key things to remember as you start to blog is to, “Be a person, not a persona.” Blog about what you know, what you care about and what you hope your community will find useful.
We all want to connect even virtually with the real person behind the curtain. Step out on your blogging stage and be yourself.
Use the Web 2.0 tools as a conduit for empowering your ideas and reaching out to a new audience. And don’t leave your community hanging! Blog at least three times a week and remember don’t fall into the “back to me” syndrome. Don’t blog just about you – blog the bigger idea, the larger context and what will be helpful to your readership.
Every fifth blog post ask your readers a question at the end of your post, you’d be surprised how quickly you’ll start generating comments.
Every month try to feature at least one other blogger as part of a blog post and let people know about them too. The YA authors are absolutely superb about doing this by the way and building repricocity.
Mommy bloggers are wonderful examples of this as well. But anyone can do it!
Now go and blog the change you want to see in the world!
“If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on the fence and watch the birds.” — Wilbur Wright
Today at BEA, I came across several folks who felt compelled to tell me they did not Twitter, did not Facebook, did not DIGG and did not much “cotten” to social media one bit. In fact, they said, they weren’t ever going to use it as they thought it was a giant waste of time.
They also were worried that social media and all this exposure might not be safe in the long run because social media involves one sharing real information about one’s life.
Remember when people only used typewriters to write news stories? Remember when the Wright Brothers were chased home by bigger kids flapping their arms and laughing at them? Remember when candles were the only source of light?
We’re in that kind of place with social media. I think the term itself may be throwing folks off because perhaps it is the word “social” that scares the heck out of us. My question is, “Why should it?”
“Why would you want 14,000 people following you?” Let’s think about it, if you’re a book author and you’re carrying 4000 books you’ve got to sell and you suddenly come upon a literary gang of 14,000 book lovers blogging, Tweeting, Linking, and Facebooking toward you – are you going to run the other way simply because they’re being too social?
Would you turn down an opportunity to have a virtual community of buzzmakers who read and relish every page you’ve ever written just because they happen to be Tweeters?
My Great Aunt Florence used to say, “If you’re too clever for your own good and you can’t spin a good yarn, then pretty soon no one invites you for fried chicken on Sundays anymore.”
Don’t be too clever about social media and all that you know it will not do for you.
Just pick one tool and use it. See what happens. Who knows? You might find one day, you’ll be virtually sitting at the head of a beautiful Sunday fried chicken supper surrounded by your very own large, powerful and beloved online community.
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Am in NY for BookEXPO and just finished presentation on Web 2.0 for Book Publicity with my brilliant co-hort and presenter David Mathison of BetheMedia. We were part of the Advanced Track that the wonderful IBPA puts together.
Wonderful participants in the room who really are going to embrace social media and move forward into the Web 2.0 to beyond and engage all of us with their wonderful books!
It’s extraordinary when you hear all this doom and gloom about the publishing industry that the room was filled with folks of all ages and titles and everyone there was comitted to embracing and learning about social media.
Web 2.0 (and whatever it will be called to Web 80.0 in the future) is here and publishers are very in tune and ready to embrace it. They work fervently on behalf of their authors and it is humbling to see how hard their marketers and publicists work internally to use all these tools.
My goal is always to empower and help people understand they can do these things on their own! If my 72 year old mom can blog and twitter, and my tween daughter can blog then everyone can!
I challenge you today to go and sign up for Twitter, or Linkedin.com or build a virtual bookshelf on Shelfari.com - you don’t need to hire someone to do it for you!
Join the conversation! Comment below and tell me how you feel about social media and publishing!
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Also, just finished my copy of this week’s New York magazine. I love the mag, but was disappointed that they had a story titled, “Spam Haiku,” about Twitter where once again a journalist just used the Nielsen study on Twitter citing, “Recently Nielsen reported that 60% of people who use Twitter once fail to return the following month.”
Unfortunately, this study as I’ve written previously and other social media folks have also covered, did not take into account the other apps that people are using to access Twitter. So if you log in and create your account, post your first Tweet and then decide forever after to use TweetDeck, or Tweetie or other apps – and never login directly through the Twitter site login, then you were counted as the 60% who left after using Twitter only one time.
Ok, I sound like a tech geek here, but having spent almost ten years as a technology journalist, I have to say, “Folks, please spend more time researching stats about social media!!! Please don’t just pick one line out of a study and quote it as the seminal stat without really finding out more.” UGH.
Now be on your way. It’s memorial weekend and I’m turning my computer off and heading to the beach with the kids and hubby.
God Bless my late Gramps, Major General John M. Reynolds, Air Force who served our country in three wars.
What a blessing to have such an amazing Gramps.
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“I wanted instead to write books that were fire and ice, wind sweeping the earth. I wanted to write books that, once experienced, could not be forgotten, books that would be cherished as we cherish the most exquisite light we have ever seen. I had contempt for anything less than this perfect book that I could imagine. This book that lived in my imagination was small and perfect and I wanted it to live in person after person, forever. Even in the darkest of human times, it would live. Even in the life of one person who would sustain it and be sustained by it, it would live. I wanted to write a book that would be read even by one person, but always. For the rest of human time some one person would always know that book, and think it beautiful and fine and true, and then it would be like any tree that grows, or any grain of sand. It would be, and once it was it would never not be.
In my secret longings there was another desire as well, not opposite but different, not the same but as strong. There would be a new social order in which people could live in a new way. There would be this new way of living which I could, on the edges of my mind and in the core of my being, imagine and taste. People would be free, and they would live decent lives, and those lives would not be without pain, but they would be without certain kinds of pain. They would be lives untouched by prisons and killings and hunger and bombs. I imagined that there could be a world without institutionalized murder and systematic cruelty.
I imagined that I could write a book that would make such a world possible.”
–Andrea Dworkin, 1978
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I found this fascinating story on Bezos and Kindle, here’s an excerpt quote:
Amazon is not-so-quietly building a wall between itself, its competitors, and open e-book formats. It’s time to show them that those of us who seek e-book readers without boundaries will not stand for their market monopolization and Soviet-style platform containment.Mr. Bezos, Tear Down This Wall, May 2009
You should read the whole article as it’s important in terms of Amazon and Kindle.
Very cool project that Perseus Books Group is helming this year at BookExpoAmerica in NY. (I will be there next week!)
The project is titled, BOOK: The Sequel and I just got my shiny new widget for it to put on my blog. I’m entering today.
Perseus Books Group is spearheading this collaborative effort to publish a book – during the span of BEA – to highlight all the new ways to publish. The book will be created by all of you and published into as many formats as possible in 48 hours.
Submissions are ongoing and readers are invited to write the first sentence of a sequel to a book they love (and the title if they are feeling espescially creative.) The website will display contributions as they are accepted.
Submissions close on Thursday May 28th, at 4pm – first day of BEA.
Samples from the press announcement include:
“You see; I was right.” (From Das Kapital (revised edition) by Karl Marx
“Call Me, Ishmael!” (From Moby Dick’s Guide to Dating at Sea)
The book party launch will take place in the Perseus Books Group booth (#4237) at 4pm on Saturday, May 30th. All royalties from BOOK: The Sequel will go to the National Book Foundation.
Perseus Books Group ROCKS! Go and enter today.
Wonderful post by Cameron Chapman at Mashable that lists 100 authors that are using Twitter. And I love what she wrote in regard to how she picked the folks to list, “One very apparent trend is that some authors only plug their books or related products in their tweets and never provide any other information. These authors were culled from the list in favor of those writers who are trying to carry on a conversation with their followers and present information they might find valuable, whether it directly benefits them or not. After all, why would I want to follow someone who only tries to sell me something?”
EXACTLY! If you’re being told by social media “experts” on webinars, in their e-newsletters or even in their tweets that Twitter is a viral marketing tool, that you can sell thousands of books by overtweeting and overfollowing folks etc., then please re-read Cameron’s quote above. And also read the tweets those authors on her list are putting out.
I challenge you today to disconnect for one month from all webinars focused at social media and how they are going to teach you how to do it, espescially if you have to pay for the webinar or online EVENT.
Think of social media like you would riding a bicycle. You’re the rider and the shiny red bicycle will take you anywhere you want, but it has to be YOU (the real you – not a ghost you, not a marketing assistant you, the REAL you) riding the bike!!! Now get pedaling!
Start slow – pick out one social media site or tool to tackle and you’ll be surprised how quickly you drop your training wheels and are speeding down the road!
Check out the latest news on the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Finalists. The contest was sponsored by Amazon.com, Inc., Penguin Group (USA), and Createspace.
Go and vote on the finalists! Voting is open until Thursday May 21st at 11:59 PM EDT. It will be interesting to see who lands as the winner!
Amazon has just launched Amazon Encore as another fantastic way for you to have the opportunity to publish your book.
Here’s an excerpt from the announcement, “AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers. “
Here is the link for all the information from Amazon.
I love the wild wild Web and all it’s producing for authors in terms of new tools to use to promote your books. There is an espescially cool site fReado , still in beta,but definitely worth checking out.
I recommend you register with the site or at the very least, ask your publisher if they are registering your book for you on the site. Also you can follow them on Twitter.com/fReado .
Disclaimer: No, I’m not an affiliate of the site. No, I make no money telling you to register. No, I did not put the tack in my teacher’s chair in third grade. Yes, I did steal a copy of William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy when I was in 7th grade from our school libary and I still have it.
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