I’m a gues
t at #yalitchat on Twitter tonight between 9:00 and 10:00 Eastern time talking about freelance writing. If you join the chat, host Georgia N. McBride (@Georgia_McBride) will be giving away 4 copies of my book throughout the hour. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow me at @hwrightwriter. I generally just post links to interesting writing blogs that I’ve found. I will be talking about my new book soon, but don’t expect any hourly hard sell sales pitches.
Writing Challenge Update
Two more days to go and I will have almost achieved my goal of writing every day for 30 days. Like millions of people shocked by the horrific events of Friday, I spend a day tearful, numbed and shaken. I wrote nothing, and felt very thankful to be able to hug my son. In the big picture, my goal doesn’t really mean that much.
I did do one thing that day. I had promised myself, when I had time, that I’d finally houseclean the list of the people that I follow on Twitter. I have become increasingly annoyed by the hourly promotions that are automatically generated by people that I have chosen to follow. Many of them are writers whose purpose on Twitter seems simply to sell books, rather than engage with other writers. We’re not fellow writers; we’re potential buyers. Yup, I’m that naive.
Anyhow, Friday afternoon, I scrolled through my Twitter feeds and simply ‘unfollowed’ a bunch of people. They were easy to spot among the many who posted personal responses to the events of the day. When I started using Twitter in its early days, I felt that I was connected with people who were actually in front of their computers at the same time I was. We sometimes had conversations! That seems to be gone. I realize that I was harsh to judge people on that awful day, but it did clarify an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Yes, I’ve done some promotion on Twitter, but if you check the history of my tweets @hwrightwriter, you’ll see that I don’t do it very often. And certainly not more than once a day. To many that means that I’m not using Twitter to its best potential. To me, it means I’m respecting my followers who have better things to do than read hourly book plugs from me. If you’re thinking that, if I don’t like it, I shouldn’t play in Twitter’s sandbox. You’re probably right. And when I’ve had a little more time to think about it, I may do just that.
How do you use Twitter? If you use it to drive sales, is it effective? Have you found other social media that you prefer to keep you connected to people in the publishing business or to key people in whatever field you are interested in?
Social Media Decisions and Questions
Hi Everyone,
I’ve finally taken the leap and created a Facebook page for Heather Wright Writer. It’s a place for me to share links to articles that I think will be useful to other writers. I belong to a number of groups where I’ve posted these links in the past, but the groups have become more “buy my book” groups with most of the posts being along those lines and that’s not where I want to be.
On my page, I try to post a link to something useful and writerly every day or two, so you’ll only hear from me once a day at the very most–and I won’t be using it to post advertising promos about my books. I might offer a link to a free chapter, but that would probably be it. Please follow along if you think you would be interested.
I’m on Twitter, too, if you’d like to follow @hwrightwriter. Once again, you can look at my list of recent posts and see that I don’t send out automated sales messages every 2 hours and rarely do any book promotion unless it’s to specific groups that I think will find my work useful. If you want to read someone who (better than I) expresses her dismay at the use of Twitter for bombarding people with marketing messages, drop by Kristen Lamb’s excellent blog and see what I mean.
How are you handling your social media choices? Do you have more than one FB page or blog or Twitter account? How do you feel about book marketing on social media? Do you buy books based on Twitter marketing blurbs?