D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

social media

The Learning Curve Ahead Shouts a Wary Caution

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I have created a monster. I’m off and running on a new project—interviewing authors for my blog. I’m excited to get going with this. I really am, but here’s the thing. You have to be organized to do this, and I am an organizer. But I’m also incorporating new tools into my web site and its email which are forcing me to learn a bunch of new stuff. (That word “stuff” is pretentiously literary, isn’t it?) So although I may be promising to get the questions out to my subjects “in a few days,” I’m using only the loosest definition of “a few” since I’m still working on them. It could be weeks. Curve!

The first new tool was a change in my email server. My web designer decided to move his email from his own server due to problems, and that necessitated a move for me as well. He kindly offered to take care of the tech end of it, and I am now all moved over to a free email hosting site. However, there are all these bells and whistles. I may not have to use them all, but some could prove very useful. Curve!

Which brings me to the question of a calendar to keep track of the schedule for the year. I didn’t want to use my phone calendar; it’s full enough with personal reminders. I started with Microsoft’s calendar, but it turns out the email server site has its own calendar. I transferred everything over to it, but I still have the Microsoft calendar running just in case. Curve!

A few days ago I announced on Twitter and Facebook that I was setting out on this new adventure. Now, I’ve filled the year up. I’m only going to post these interviews once a month, at least for a while. I have to see how it goes. With only 12 spaces to fill, it was pretty easy. (And the fact that I’d already set up an interview with a friend for January eased the transition.)

I hope to concentrate on female characters and their empowerment, but I will most likely tweak this aspiration as I go. What I really want is to get to know some new people, and if I reach a few more potential readers along the way, all the better. It should be an interesting year. Here’s to making new friendships and broadening my social media skills.

Freed from Social Media Self-Published Author Slavery

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I love words. I love how easy it is to manipulate them to mean something they never meant to mean, and I love how they roll off my tongue when I read a good piece of writing aloud. As a novelist, nailing the essence of a character’s feelings at a particular moment in the story pleases me greatly. I write because I can’t not write.

Lately, however, I have found myself writing less and less as I’m tied down to a task that I not only take no pleasure in whatsoever but which seems pointless to the point of pain. Marketing. Promoting. Selling the artistic soul. Yeah, that. And for what?

Here’s how it is for the self-published author. You write the book. If you lack the ability or the gift, you pay someone else to edit and proofread the book, design the cover for the book, set up the interior layout of the book and, ultimately, make sure the book all comes together as a cohesive whole. And that, it turns out, is only the beginning.

Or the end. Because before you ever sat down to write that book, you should have been blogging and signing up for every social media site available. You should have had a platform ready to go before you knew what a platform was. The platform, they say, is key to establishing your brand, and establishing your brand is paramount to success in self-publishing.

Or, so they say.

The reality is somewhat removed from all the articles (hundreds upon hundreds, perhaps thousands) written almost daily regarding how to do all that marketing stuff and how if you just do as “I” say (whoever “I” is), you’ll see your sales increase tenfold—nay—a hundredfold.

Yeah, right. In the end, it’s just so much BS.

Imagine yourself in a room filled with people—and I do mean filled with people. To the point where breathing is but a distant memory and you wonder if you’ll ever know the refreshment of a cool breeze on your skin again because no place on your body is untouched by part of someone else’s body. All of that crushing humanity, and everyone shouting incessantly, “BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK!! BUY MY BOOK!!!”

That’s what my Facebook news feed and my Twitter feed look like. The weight of humanity landing on my social media accounts, yelling directly in my ear that the pictured book in the link to Amazon with the guy and his six- or eight-pack abs on the cover is definitely the book I want to buy. (I use this particular illustration because romance seems to be the bestseller of bestsellers in the indie world—most poorly written, pushed out half a dozen a year by any individual author and beloved by their readers. I have to admit that as a feminist, I find this appalling, and as a writer…well, you get the picture.)

I read a blog today called “Please shut up: Why self-promotion as an author doesn’t work,” and I took Delilah S. Dawson’s cautionary tale as the call of a liberator unlocking and opening the door to the marketing cage. I’m stepping out of the room where all the hawkers screech and returning to writing. I’m totally finished with Instagram, and Twitter will mostly languish. I’ll stay in touch with friends on Facebook, but my “author” presence will diminish a bit.

As Ms. Dawson goes into marvelous detail about why social media doesn’t work, I refer you to her and her blog on the topic to defend my decision and, perhaps, to allow you to hear the call and decide for yourself.

(And note, as I did when I went to link to the blog post, that she’s added a new one today discussing what she knows about being marketed to from a reader’s perspective. Also good stuff.)

I Don’t Want to be One of Those

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I have often thought of myself as the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes.  You know, the one who points out the emperor’s buck naked?  I look at things that others take for granted and ask WTF.  This does not aid my popularity.  Most people don’t want to be pointed out as fools, no matter how the fairy story goes.  I’m about to open my mouth again, so get ready for the tar-and-ruffled-feathering.

I signed on to Facebook back in December of 2010 for the sole purpose of using it to promote my writing.  I had nothing published at the time, but I figured I’d require some time to adjust to social media.  I adjusted, and not quite a year ago I established a page for my series, Lisen of Solsta.  Dropped like a dead balloon.  An initial rush of 18 likes and then nothing for many moons.  I let the page languish, occasionally posted bits of news and then moved on, remaining active on my personal page.

About a month ago, after posting a comment to Anne Rice’s page, I was contacted by a wonderful man who edits books for a living and who, even after I declined his offer of editing my next book, shared my page with others and invited them to like it.  I got to 30 likes within a couple of days.  This opened up the world of Facebook’s analysis and various data on the activity on my page.

Over the next several weeks, I got to 49, but I’ve been stuck there for a week.  Can’t get one more person to like my page to get me up to 50, and I’ve been somewhat of a pain in the butt about it.  How come all these other writers are crowing about 300 likes, 400 likes, and I can’t even get to 50.  Yeah, how come?  I don’t know the answer, but I do know something and I’m about to dress down the emperor.

Here’s how I likely got most of likes 19 through 49.  Message to my page:  “Hi, just liked your page.  Please like mine.”  With appropriate link to get me there.  Dutifully I would comply.   I was networking, and this was great.  Making friends with other writers.  What a rush!  What I didn’t know was a page cannot like a page, so all those pages liking my page didn’t count towards my quantity of likes.  Nor did my like count if I got there directly from my page.  (Check it out; you don’t even have to like it.)

But I digress, ever so slightly.  My point is this.  Anne Rice has over 700,000 likes.  Her “People of the Page” are readers of her books, fans of her books, hence fans of hers.  They didn’t make a deal with her that if they liked her page, she’d reciprocate by liking theirs.  She earned those likes because she is a writer who has written multiple best sellers and influenced these people’s lives to the point where they wanted to share some little part of her by participating on her page.

Not so with my likes #19 through #49.  I had to barter for their love.  Are any of them actually interested in what I’ve written?  I believe one or two have bought my book, and maybe they’ll read it one day.  But the rest?  A deal struck between two attention-starving artists.  How can that be right?

And more.  Most of these writers with their multiple hundreds of likes pound out one book, seek out little or no counsel on what they’ve written, maybe edit it once, maybe—just maybe—proofread it once, then toss it up onto Amazon for Kindle publication.  Because that’s all there is to writing, right?  Who cares if the grammar and punctuation suck?  Who cares if the sentence structure is shit?  Who cares if the formatting looks entirely unprofessional?  Writing is writing, right?

Wrong.  Writing is a craft, a skill honed over time.  Like a blacksmith with a sword, a real writer pounds the steel once and calls it a first draft, then folds it over on itself, often  many, many times, until  she can offer up a weapon which in its unity is much stronger than its components (in this case, the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the scenes and the chapters become a work of art known as a book).  She allows others to beat the steel so that her weaknesses get worked out of the metal by the strengths of others.  Writing is a craft, and it is work.  Making up a story isn’t writing; it is merely mental masturbation.  It is in the execution that mastery can shine, but only if one is willing to give over large chunks of her soul.

I know I’ve gone on long enough for a single blog, but here’s the thing.  All those likes for writers (many of whom do not respect the craft) from other writers (many of whom do not respect the craft) are empty.  Just a popularity contest.  Yeah, the more likes you have, the more attention Facebook pays you, but they signify one thing and one thing only—how many asses you had to kiss to get them.  These people aren’t your fans; they’re bartering partners.  I’d rather my likes came from my fans.  And if that number remains at 18, I can live with that.  Because those people can’t wait to read my second book, and I don’t want to disappoint them.

Check out my web site which will connect you with, amongst other things, my Lisen of Solsta Facebook page.