With many aspiring authors going down the self-publishing and small press route, it is ever more important for them to have a good understanding of marketing, networking and self promotion. Without the sizeable marketing budgets of the large publishing houses, many writers are left to do the lion's share of the marketing themselves, and there are many small presses and e-book publishers who prefer writers who have a proven understanding of social networking.
The web is flooded with social networking platforms with more coming online every day, and it is worth your while knowing about them all. I'm going to very quickly cover the basics of three social networking platforms and some of the pros and cons of each of them: Blogger, Tumblr. and Twitter.
Blogger is Google's blogging platform and has been around since 1999. You can create and customise the layout and design of your blog with very little knowledge of the web. It's easy for people to follow you and there is already a vast and well established network of writers on Blogger with whom you can network, share your writing and share advice. A blog allows you to write extensive posts, all of which can be commented on so that you can interact directly with your readers. Blogger's new extension also allows you to create static pages, making Blogger all the more usable as an alternative to having a website. It also comes with detailed inbuilt stats.
However, as with all social network platforms, you are not in charge of the hosting. If Google should decide to shut down Blogger, or if they suspend it for maintenance, there's not much you can do about it. And while you can customise the designs, without a solid knowledge of HTML, the designs do have their limitations. There are people who will claim that a blog on Blogger looks 'unprofessional', but a solid standing on any of the social networks is becoming a selling point for writers, and you can support your blog with a website of your own if you feel that will increase your air of professionalism. Also, getting people to read your blog can be a struggle; people have busy lives and, more often than not, they have their own blogs to write and not a lot of time to read long posts.
Tumblr. is a relatively new kid on the block founded in 2007, a year after Twitter. It is a micro-blogging site, advertising itself as being "to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct." Posts are quickly created with a choice of pre-determined post types: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, Video. There are a huge amount of blog designs to choose from (most are free, or you can pay for premium designs), but you will need to be very web savvy to create your own design. You can also grab yourself a button for your browser's bookmark toolbar to quickly post things that you find on the net, and sync accounts to automatically post your new Tumblr. posts to your Facebook and Twitter profiles.
Tumblr. is probably less well known than other social networking sites and seems to lack the direct interaction of either Blogger or Twitter. People can 'like' or 're-blog' your posts, but comments can only be left by people you follow, or those who have followed you for 2 weeks or more. You won't find the celebrities here like you do on Twitter, and you won't get the sense of community you can from Blogger, but you can get a lot of instant inspiration all in one place.
Twitter restricts your posts, or 'tweets' to just 140 characters including spaces and punctuation. It might sound horrendous for a writer to be so restricted, but it certainly does push you to be more creative. Think of it as flash fiction; as an excellent lesson in editing and making every word count. 140 characters makes it quick and easy to keep updated; you can easily sync it with your mobile to update while you're on the move, which is why it is the social network of choice for many celebrities who want to keep in touch with their followers but don't have a lot of time. Twitter is packed full of an entire range of literary interest tweeters from authors and publishers to literary magazines seeking submissions and local new writing theatres.
Twitter can take a while to get into, and a while to work out how to make the most of it, but there are hundreds of sites filled with advice and tips that you can read. Also, because of the 140 character restriction, you'll come across a lot of abbreviations and jargon that can seem like a foreign language at first. But you will get the hang of it very quickly. And you will become quickly addicted. The short tweets make you feel like you're not wasting a lot of time, but you can easily twitter away hours in a day. If you include certain buzz words in your tweet (like if you're talking about your iPhone) you will get bombarded with spam, but you can easily block those accounts and report them as spam.
Each social networking site has its good and bad points, and the best way is to just try them out: you can always delete your account if you don't get along with them. But if you really want to promote yourself as a writer, it's good to know about the different options open to you, whether you use them or not.
0 comments:
Post a Comment