Facebook and Me

First of all, let me say that my birthday is not listed in Facebook. I notice that many of my friends list their birthdays on Facebook. Happy birthday to them, but I think it's a bad idea, like announcing your vacation plans on Facebook. Or mentioning your mother's maiden name, or your high school mascot, or the name of your first pet. Or your Social Security number.

Having said that, and revealed (or perhaps only hinted at) the depths of my personal paranoia, I will now say something nice about Facebook. Facebook will sell you absolutely the cheapest ads imaginable.

Yes, I bought an ad on Facebook last week. I was delighted with it. I ran it for two days at ten dollars a day. It was by way of announcing that I had successfully published Monkeystorm on CreateSpace as a paperback.

That was pretty much all I did the week before last, prepare the book for publication and make a cover. As I have surely mentioned to you until you're sick of hearing it, Monkeystorm went up as a Kindle a couple of weeks ago. But some of my friends complained that they had no Kindle, that they in fact detested reading on an electronic device and wanted a paper book.

How hard could that be? I asked myself. Not all that hard, as it turned out, given that the folks at CreateSpace were willing to work with a docx file. Formatting text is for me a little like cutting a movie together. It's satisfying in almost the same way. Word has a command for drop caps! I could put drop caps at the beginning of each chapter! Elegant! In the end I was able to use Word to submit the whole thing, even the cover, which has to be a PDF. I did the cover art with GIMP and inserted it as a picture file. All you have to do is set the margins to zero.

But enough of this technical jargon. The point of the story is that I made an actual book out of my virtual book, which CreateSpace now offers for sale. I set the price at $8.99, as cheap as I could make it and still see a tiny little royalty. Now to get the word out, I said to myself.

So I made an announcement on my Facebook page, with an image of the cover, the angry gorilla face. Facebook said, this could be an ad, Kate Gallison. I said, yes.

They give you options of whom to show your ad to. By age. By sex. By geographical location. By education level. By interest (everybody has entered their interests, right?) By whether or not they already know you. They say, okay, you have chosen a universe of 75,483,221. These people will see your ad. (Actually not all of them will see your ad. Some of them will see your ad.) You tell them, run the ad for two days at ten dollars a day. Within those parameters, they charge by the click. A Facebook patron clicks on your ad, and Facebook charges you, up to ten dollars a day. So now I am a predator instead of the preyed upon. I have bought into their business plan, that of selling their patrons.

Here are my ultimate statistics, according to Facebook:

5,196 people saw the Facebook post that was the ad.

57 people clicked on it.

31 people liked it. Perfect strangers, most of them.

One guy in Utah (Say, I wonder if he knows my nephew Tim) left me a comment.

Of course, nobody bought the book. But, hey. You can't have everything. When I mount my campaign to sell Bucker Dudley I'll have a handle on how running an ad on Facebook works, and I'll try it again.

Kate Gallison

Riding the Beast of Social Media

The cool weather is back. I wake from my long summer's torpor and pick up my Authors Guild Bulletin. It says here that other writers are prospering in their careers through skillful use of social media.

How does one do this? A couple of years ago I got some advice from Janet Reid, the Query Shark, who gave me tips on improving my web site (www.kategallison.com), told me to post on my blog three times a week, and guided me onto Twitter. My Twitter handle is @kategallison. Oh, please follow me. I still don't have many followers. On the other hand I don't tweet much. But this is about to change.

Alafair Burke's Puppy

Alafair Burke (@alafairburke) is good on Twitter, Janet says. I follow her, and it's true. She shares personal stuff without grossly invading her own privacy, a fine line to walk, and interacts gracefully with other tweeters. Besides being a lovely person and an engaging writer, Alafair has a really cute puppy.

J.T. Ellison (@thrillerchick) was mentioned in the Authors Guild article as having an excellent Facebook presence. I looked, and it's true. Odyl helped her design the application, and Involver handles her mailing list. Constant Contact is one of many other services that will do this for people. The mailing list is used to direct the newsletter.

Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) won an award for her Twitter activities. She's a lot of fun to follow. Her web site is very nice, having been developed over a period of years. The visual design is gorgeous, and the functions work well.

All of these women are writers of enviable success, and owe some of it to social media. What are they doing that the rest of us can emulate? Here's a plan.

Write a really excellent book. (Hey, I did that. A couple of times.)

Choose your social media venue carefully. Don't overextend yourself. Nobody does everything. Remember you're going to have to update early and often. Here's what's out there that's been useful for reaching readers:

• Your web site. You have to have one. I'll tell you what needs to be on it in my next post, and suggest ways to put it together whether or not you have technical expertise. Meanwhile check out the above links to other people's sites.
• Your blog. That can be the same as your web site, with a little tweaking. Blogger supports custom URLs, and a number of other platforms probably do too. (If you don't know what any of  that means, don't worry about it. We'll talk later.)
• Your newsletter. You will write this at regular intervals and your mailing service will mail it out to the people who gave them their emails and said they wanted it. (I haven't been doing one. Maybe later.)
• Facebook. You can put up an author page on Facebook, which is different from the "wall" you use to send baby pictures to Aunt Fanny. It can, and should, be beautifully decorated and fancy.
• Twitter. Post short, clever observations here, hang around to see what goes on, and become involved in conversations. Post links to items of interest.
• Goodreads. You should explore that. I'm no good at it.
• Youtube. You can put book trailers up, if you have the skills or the money, or you can post home movies of your puppy.

There are others. These are the most popular right now. I don't understand the usefulness of LinkedIn to writers unless they're looking for day jobs, but there are groups on LinkedIn where you can talk to other writers.

Be open to hiring help. (For setting up pages and mailing lists, that is, not for writing tweets, blog posts, or Facebook remarks. That's supposed to be you talking.)

So here I go, all set to drum up a little interest before the next book comes out (MONKEYSTORM, or maybe BUCKER DUDLEY.) I'm going to try out some of the things mentioned in the Authors Guild article as well as the things I talked about here. I'll let you know how it goes.

I am not going to get a puppy.

Kate Gallison

Internet Constant Contact: How Much Is Too Much?

We need to talk.  Before my thoughts on this subject solidify.

On Facebook, two or three of my friends tend to post or share pictures eight or ten times quickly within half an hour or so.  On Twitter, there are people who tweet twelve or fifteen times a day.

“Bling!”  “Bling!” If my phone makes a noise announcing a text message, I pay attention.  It could be a family member who needs help.  It could be a witty friend inviting me for a chat and a glass or three of wine.  It could be my agent announcing a movie deal!  Most likely: it’s another writer tweeting to announce a new blog post.  Sometimes, it all seems like a bit much.

I agree wholeheartedly that we all need to take full advantage of the opportunities available from sites like Facebook and Twitter.  I have a feeling I don’t do enough.  You may feel the same.  Like most of the writers I know well, I am more or less desperate to attract attention to my work.  I am not at all above using shameless self-promotion.  Look what I am doing right now, for instance.  And yes, I will FB and tweet links to this rant.  This is all true.  But that said, I for one will benefit from some discussion of the question “How much is too much?” Is all this social media stuff something to do while procrastinating about getting on with the next book? 

Getting a substantive conversation going on a blog is a tricky business, but I hold out hope that you will weigh in on this.  How much is just enough when it comes to these sorts of communications?  And how many tweets or postings a day would you say are too many?  How should we space them out?  And how would you politely tell that wonderful writer whose work you so admire that telling everyone on FB every time her cat sneezes is not going to get us to like her more?

 Before I start annoying the stuffing out of all my friends, I really need to know what you think?

Annamaria Alfieri