Adventures in Social Media, part 1

As a struggling writer with a day job, for years I viewed "social media" as a time vortex. Many, many people over the years have told me I needed to start a blog, and get a Twitter account. When I tried telling them I simply didn't have time for that, they would explain what blogs, Instagram, and Twitter were.

These non-writers couldn't understand the difference between, "I know what social media is, but don't have the time for it," and "Golly - I've never heard of that. Why don't you explain it to me again?" In fact, the more non-writers argued with me about this, the more of my time they wasted, the more resistant I became.

And then I discovered the weekly Writer's Forum on Fark.com.

Some of the writers there described their own successes and struggles with self-publishing, the hardships of breaking into "traditional" publishing, and shared various tips and pitfalls.

I started asking for advice, and several folks were very helpful. I emailed the Writer's Forum's moderator and suggested a topic for the weekly discussion: tips and pitfalls in self-publishing. The moderator agreed that many people would be interested in that discussion.

Getting advice from somebody who actually knows what they are talking about is very different from somebody spouting the first thing that pops into their head.

Many Writer's Forum commenters shared similar responses: A good cover helps a lot in generating interest. Writing a series creates a built-in audience for future books, and releasing new books often results in a spike in downloads for older books in the series. Know your genre, and write for that audience.

But the most helpful advice came from several writer's explaining the importance of social media, and how to use it effectively. That was a major turning point for me. For years non-writers had been telling me, "You should do it anyway," but now people were telling me, "Here's is how to increase your audience and downloads." One tidbit I learned was that some authors will promote their ebook's publication six months in advance.

So I started this blog a couple months ago, and reactivated my old Twitter account @FHerbertLostarc which I made when I tried crowd-funding my book about Frank Herbert's lost archive of newspaper articles from his early career.

Just within the last couple weeks my "social media experiment" has started showing results. Among other things, I came into contact with an amazing artist who has agreed to create book cover art for me. While I originally asked him to create a cover for my Frank Herbert book, after seeing the rest of his online portfolio I definitely want him making a cover for my upcoming "Cthulhu Mythos" book.

But that is another story for another time.