This blog post is not me imparting wisdom. This blog post is me essentially asking for help.
Everyone is telling authors they need a platform, they need an audience, they need to leverage the Internet and social media. Right, okay. Consider me on the other side. Say I already have a considerable social media set up… Then what?
I’m going to list the various ways I currently have in place for meeting an audience. I’m not bragging, I’m more showing the mess I’ve gotten myself into.
- I Should Be Writing podcast
- ISBW blog
- ISBW PDF
- Murverse blog
- Murverse mailing list
- Tumblr
- Facebook (personal page and fan page)
- Goodreads blog (largely inactive)
- Amazon.com Author Blog (something I keep meaning to start cause I think it would be a good idea.)
Those are the ones I can think of. I also blog here and at Tor.com. So Mur, you may be thinking, what’s the problem? So many megaphones, so many different ways to reach audiences!
Yeah. That’s the problem.
Let’s say I have a thought. I have been known to have a couple from time to time. I want to share said thought. I then have to decide where it goes. Is it a thought that would be best stated in 140 characters? Twitter. Or facebook, maybe. Is it just a random thought or image or quote, longer than tweet length? Tumblr. Is it about writing? ISBW. But which one: blog, podcast, or is it long enough to add to my free PDF release? Or should I save it for Storytellers Unplugged?
My biggest problem is my home page, the Murverse. Originally meant to be an “all things Mur” hub, I filter all my podcasts through there, but not my blog posts. When I’m in the mood to blog, I usually end up putting the writing thoughts on ISBW or the SF thoughts on Tor.com. Writing rarely ends up on Murverse, which is odd, because writing is a huge part of my life.
The Facebook pages and the mailing list are the most neglected. I don’t like porting Twitter posts to Facebook for two reasons: different audiences (lots more real life friends follow me on FB) and regurgitating content feels insincere. This is why I haven’t started the Goodreads or Amazon blogs. They seem like a good idea, but how do I choose what content goes there?
I’m suffering from too many megaphones, I know. And instead of finding a way to trim them down, I’m wondering if I need more; if my writing podcast needs its own dedicated Twitter account where I just talk about writing (even though keeping a personal blog and a writing blog seems to be working so well for me right now…) I wonder if I should take the Murverse and make it a full hub, taking all my projects under that umbrella and giving each project, whether it’s a show or fiction project, its own feed. (Through the magic of feedburner, nothing would change on the listeners’ ends.)
I feel like Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. All of my social media megaphones are out of control, dancing around, mocking me. Well, not that they do anything without me working on them, but several of them are rotting from disuse and I don’t know how to deal with it. Cut them out? Use most of them to regurgitate content from my main Twitter and blogs? One site or many? Augh!
This is a problem you could end up having if you don’t have a plan when you start out. Sure, social media is a great idea, but if you just charge headlong, or join something because it seems like a good idea at the time, then it’s pretty pointless. On your blog or twitter, decide how much of your own life you’re going to reveal. Decide what you want each megaphone to do, who you want it to talk to. Remember that you never know who’s reading (Many agents and editors find angry blog posts and tweets about themselves from rejected authors. This does not endear them to the author.) and to always write as if your mom, your eighth grade teacher, and your pastor are reading. I’m not saying be a Puritan; you may not care if those people are reading, but always be aware that they might. And be aware that the audiences for the different places are different. High school friends will read my facebook, but not so much Twitter. If you have an Amazon or Goodreads blog, you know you’re being read by book lovers.
You can do so much with these tools. You can connect with readers, other authors, collaborate, or even use them as storytelling tools themselves. They’re definitely not something to be ignored or feared. I just need to stop sinking and learn how to swim.
I have a novel solution. I am on almost as many – if not more – platforms as you are – livejournal, goodreads, librarything, facebook, etc etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. I take care of a handful of these. My husband is in charge of updating the social media blogs – they often have completely different audiences and so I don’t mind if I mix and match entries and have ‘em appear on more than one platform at staggered intervals. But the point is – there are TWO of us doing this. Otherwise I would be doing no writing whatsoever. ALL my time and energy would be spent keeping up with myself on the various platforms – or else there would be an order of magnitude fewer platforms, and much rarer updates.
My solution to the problem is summarised in two words: GET HELP…
I might add, if I didn’t make myself clear, that I do all the WRITING of the material to go into the various blogs. Hubby does the manual updating of various sites with currently available material, deciding what goes where and how it appears there…
Hi Mur,
Interesting, and potentially frustrating, problem!
I am not familiar with you, your books or your way of working (though I have bookmarked your writing podcasts to go back to, as a start) but here is my offering:
Simplify. Consolidate. Make Murverse the hub you originally invisioned
Then branch out. Here’s why.
Somewhere in your post you mention something about being in pieces – I think. Or, perhaps that was just the thought that occurred to me when reading of your dilemma. A piece of you here, a piece of you there – this tends to not only put strain on you, it also keeps your followers/fans hopping about (should they take the time to do so). “Too many clicks” has been the bane of many online ventures over the years. I don’t think the advent of social media has changed that much. It’s just not a very good marketing strategy, in my view.
Anyway, I would pull everything under the main site, as a start (I am not including Twitter or Facebook, though you could pull in feeds if you wished). Do most of your blogging there, list your podcasts and your books and your other ventures all there. Give people a place to find all of you, to really form a connection.
If you write an article or do an interview or anything else for another site you are involved in put a summary and a link to it (or the entire article, depending on how you wish to do things).
I don’t want to carry on too long, but this works to give visitors (and you) a sense of a homebase, a place to belong and somewhere to return to after they follow the links to wherever you may be a visiting writer. Builds loyalty and stickyness.
If Facebook is primarily for friends and family, update when you feel like it and put your other socmed energies into twitter. You can both tweet a thought and write a fuller blog post about it, or have the tweet show up on your site – no need to choose between the two.
If you feel a need to branch out (now or later), like with the dedicated podcast twitter, run it as a secondary thing to your main site and twitter stream (making sure the same information is available there).
Also a good idea to have help, as the previous commenter says.
Sorry if I am a little disjointed. Am on a Blackberry, which is not completely to blame but doesn’t help.
I think there are ways to forward only some of your tweets to Facebook – I’ve seen people using a #fb hashtag that I think is for that purpose.
A lot of people pull in links to their blogposts on their twitterfeed, or collections of their tweets back to a blog.
There are also aggregator services – my favourite is FriendFeed – where you can plug in all your twitter, facebook, blogs, goodreads, flickr, youtube, whatever accounts and it puts it all together. People can ‘like’ and comment on FriendFeed – it’s a great place for rapidfire discussion – but you need a critical mass of users for that; what I was really going to suggest is that you then get your FriendFeed widget and embed that onto your website – then visitors can see what you’ve most recently posted, whether that’s ten tweets or a mix of tweets, blog posts, photos, whatever, and you don’t have to do any manual updating.
But also — really the most important megaphone the writer has is his/her published fiction. Other megaphones might be useful to complement and/or enhance that, but if they get so troublesome as to be in the way of it then they’re being counterproductive.
This is a really interesting discussion–thanks! I waited to start a blog until I had a specific topic to write about, and I’ve held off from much available social media, knowing it’s out there when I need it. I think my instinct was right–to pick up each tool and use it carefully, for a designated task.
I have a similar sort of problem because, I’m a techie by day, so I have a blog for that, and I haven’t another blog for writing and sci-fi related stuff. I’ve also got the requisite Twitter and Facebook accounts, but I use those for mostly personal stuff (and have Facebook set pretty tight on privacy) since I’m not famous enough for random people to get Twitter and Facebook style information. I have to wonder how relevant any of those will be by the time I get published.
As for getting a separate Twitter account for your podcast: I hate Twitter accounts that just parrot information that’s available elsewhere. But then, I actually know what an RSS feed is, and I know there’s a lot of people who basically use Twitter as their feed reader.