writing – Page 24 – Patricia J. Parsons

5 ways your social media platform might be turning toxic

Posted on 21 Nov 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

At least twice in just the past week I have acquired new Twitter followers who themselves boast over 10,000 followers. Imagine that! 10,000+ followers! I always surf over to see the profiles of my new followers and never cease to be astounded by these huge numbers. But before I click to “follow” back, I always hesitate in these instances. I always seem to have the same question for myself: “Why in the world would I want to follow someone (or some organization) with that many followers unless I’m looking for their information. They certainly won’t be interested in anything I have to say. Dear god, they’ll never be able to find it!” And I’m left wondering how anyone can possibly be in a balanced give-and-take situation when there are so many hangers-on involved.

In my day job, I’m a university professor. To be more precise, I teach in a communication studies department with a focus on public relations and corporate communication. Throughout my long career in the real world and in academia, I’ve specialized in two areas, one of which is strategy. In that capacity, I’ve helped hundreds of students develop successful promotional plans for non-profits and small businesses, and was an early adopter of social media, teaching our first undergraduate course in the new applications some years ago. It’s funny now that I’m looking at my own promotional work, I’m struck by a number of oddities in the world of social media – and authors.

My last post found me wondering if publishers really care about a writer’s life on Twitter, and thinking about that led me to contemplate the problems of social media ‘platforms’ in general. So, at the risk of alienating all of those authors and wannabe authors that I might be connected to online, here goes.

A social media platform no doubt supports sales of independently published books. Okay, I’ll buy that – but with a few caveats, the most important of which is that there needs to be some recognition of the point of diminishing returns.

I submit that a there is a point at which a writer’s online, social media presence morphs from supportive and beneficial to toxic. So here are some symptoms of toxicity that I’ve observed. You might be developing social media toxicity…

When you find yourself falling victim to group-think. It’s so easy to retweet mindlessly, to find yourself nodding in support of ideas that you hadn’t really given enough time to figure out on your own. I’ve noticed that except for the odd outlier, most reply tweets are supportive, and I even find myself falling into this trap, ignoring the tweets that I think are just plain stupid. And note that on Facebook and even Linkedin there is no “dislike” button.
When you have an over-inflated notion of how many books you should be selling based on your number of followers, friends etc. I have to hearken back to my last blog post where I began to find research to support the notion that online ‘likes’ don’t translate into behavior.
When you fall victim to that co-dependency problem. Codependency is known in mental health circles as a relationship addiction, excessive social or emotional reliance on another person who often has a problem. I’m suggesting that writers who toil in isolation often look for support among other writers who understand them, and this begins the cycle. Over-dependence can become toxic leading to inertia and the next symptom of toxicity…
When your social media activities become a major time suck. This can happen so easily. It’s like several of my students suggested the other day in class: they find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time on assignments as a result of keeping their electronics devices at their elbow and responding to every ‘ping’ as texts and tweets arrive. My advice: just turn them off!
And finally, when your admiration is seriously misplaced. I’m talking about the odd phenomenon of actual best-selling writers like Sheila O’Flanagan having fewer than 5,000 Twitter followers (and wisely following far fewer yet selling books in millions) while some indie authors who have sold a few thousand books having tens of thousands of followers. It might be worth the unknown writer’s (like me) time to follow the ones who have been on the real best-seller lists. Maybe we could learn a thing or two.

So, you might conclude that I’m just sour because I have a very few Twitter followers. But I’m not. I might have at one time when I thought that those followers might actually buy and retweet to actual buyers about my work. But that rarely happens in reality. It’s a bit like viral video: You can’t plan to use one for promotional and marketing because you have no way of knowing if a video you produce will catch fire or not.

I’m going to spend less time on my social media presence and more time on my writing. At least for now.

Book publishers

Do publishers really care about a writer’s life on Twitter?

Posted on 12 Nov 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on book marketing. This will come as no surprise to my blog readers who have been with me through various book launches. At every such juncture, I dig out my research skills to see if there is any actual hard evidence on what really works to sell books. Lately there’s been an inordinate amount of material on the need for a (huge) social media presence. Indeed, it seems to be the collective wisdom that publishers won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole if you don’t have thousands of Twitter followers, huge numbers of Facebook ‘friends’ or ‘likes,’ and more than a foot in the door of Google+. And it’s not only the traditional route to publication that seems to beg for this: there are more blog posts for indie authors on this topic than perhaps any other single current issue. But now, as it was the last time I tried to find real numbers, there doesn’t seem to be any data. I need data, people!

This search for evidence comes at the juncture of three events in my life: the release of my most recent business-related book Beyond Persuasion by the University of Toronto Press, my search for a new agent, and my foray into fiction. Add that to a media story I read last week (tweeted by a fellow academic) about the usefulness (or more specifically the uselessness) of current Twitter metrics, and I’m seriously doubting the collective wisdom.

Since publishers don’t seem to have the data, let’s start with an industry that has done their homework here. The story tweeted by my colleague focuses on a study of the use of social media by charities. Facebook users give their ‘likes’ — but not their dollars — to charities: study reports gives me some evidence.

A PhD student at the University of British Columbia studied the correlation between someone ‘liking’ a charity and actually being moved to volunteer or donate. What he found might come as something of a surprise to the more naïve among us. The more likely someone is to click like, the less likely that person is to actually give money. The researchers characterize these people as slactvitists – a new breed of individual who likes the feeling of publicly supporting a good cause but then feels no need to actually do something about it. So, if this is the case in the non-profit industry, can we not extrapolate to the book buying industry to theorize that the more likely someone is to follow you on Twitter, the less likely that person is to buy your book? It’s an interesting argument.

Okay, let’s take this argument a step further. Wait a minute, you say, even if that’s true (and maybe the book’s not for them), if they are active tweeps, then at the very least they’re more likely to tweet it. This is actually unlikely if they follow more than a few hundred people (studies do show that if you follow numerous peeps on Twitter, you cannot possibly follow their tweets with any degree of regularity), but for the sake of argument, let’s say they do tweet it, and then someone else re-tweets it and on and on. If our original premise is correct, none of this matters. Your book will be tweeted all over cyberspace and still not a single person might buy your book. Indeed, many indie authors would be millionaires (or at least making a luxurious, regular wage) if this were true. So, we’re back where we started.

It seems to me that the notion of a platform and a social media platform are two different but related concepts that need differentiation.

Just as I’ve always thought, a non-fiction author still needs a platform – and that doesn’t necessarily mean thousands of Twitter followers. That means the credentials and expertise to actually write the book. You can rest assured that neither the UTP editors nor the reviewers cared a bit about my online presence for the new book mentioned above. What they did care about was my background, education and experiential credentials, and my ability to write authentically, clearly and correctly.

Those thousands of Twitter followers might also be impressive, but they are at the lower end of what’s needed at least initially. According to one agent, this is the kind of platform you need for non-fiction and for fiction, well, it is just as I suspected, unnecessary.[1] Interestingly, though, she does indicate that when she looks at a potential fiction client’s tweets, she’s looking for the unique voice. She further considers blogging and what it might mean if you have a blog that is outdated and never used.

Literary agent Carly Watters says, “Twitter is a place for authors–who live a very solitary existence–to engage with other writers going through the same experience, follow industry veterans, follow writers they admire, and learn about how the book business works.”[2]

In her very good post A Definition of Author Platform, blogger Jane Friedman give us this useful advice: “Your platform should be as much of a creative exercise and project as the work you produce. While platform gives you power to market effectively, it’s not something you develop by posting “Follow me!” on Twitter or “Like me!” on Facebook a few times a week.”

So what might your social media presence be good for?

Finding beta readers far afield.
Doing background research and getting tips.
Finding support from like-minded, unknown writers.

And as for this last bullet, I’m reminded of the phenomenon of co-dependency – next blog post.

[1] Elizabeth Harvey in Does a virtual presence ACTUALLY help you get a literary agent?

[2] Carly Watters, 6 ways social media doesn’t help you get published

“Write what you know” – An outdated concept?

Posted on 19 Aug 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

I just finished reading B.S. Shapiro’s extraordinary novel The Art Forger. Not to give it away (because you really ought to read it), it’s the story of an aspiring artist who makes her living wage doing reproductions of famous artwork that are sold as that – copies. She does “copies” not forgeries – which is all about the intent of the piece.

I picked the book up in the first place because it is at least partly about Edgar Degas’ work, and I’ve been 20,000 words into a manuscript that revolves around Degas’ ballerina sculptures for several years now, having put it on the back burner while I finished other pieces of writing for publication (and in the meantime noting that I’m not the only writer of historical fiction who has found this an interesting subject). To say that I’m a devotee of Degas’ work might be stretching it a bit, but I am a fan, and I find some of the unanswered questions about historical characters too tantalizing to ignore (remember my book about Edgar Allan Poe?).

"More than a century and a half have passed since Edgar Allan Poe died, alone in Baltimore in 1849, and still no one really knows how - or even why he was in that city. But Bridget knows, and this is her story." — “More than a century and a half have passed since Edgar Allan Poe died, alone in Baltimore in 1849, and still no one really knows how – or even why he was in that city. But Bridget knows, and this is her story.”

Anyway, as I read the book, I felt myself becoming very educated about the fine points of both the art and the science of oil painting. I relied on the author of this fictional piece to have done her homework: I wanted to believe in the details that so made the story feel authentic and rich. But I always kept in the back of my mind that this is a work of fiction…so the question always becomes: where is the line between fiction and fact drawn in these kinds of tales, and does it matter?

Most authors whose fictional work touches on real people, places and things take great pride in doing their homework, and there is usually a note in the book somewhere indicating the aforementioned line: where researched facts give over to the imagination of the writer. So what, you might reasonably ask, does this have to do with the question of whether or not we should take heed of the old adage: “Write what you know”? It occurs to me that in these days of the World Wide Web, we can “know” a great deal more than we used to!

There was a time when research was much more difficult. If you’re as old as I am, you might remember slogging to the library to comb through page after page of real reference guides, real books, and real documents. I have to say that I think back on those days with fondness; I truly enjoyed those hours spent among the great tomes crammed with information just aching to get out. The trouble was just how long it took to actually find that information that would provide those all-important nuggets that add depth and breadth to a piece of writing.

The truth is that today, we can become semi-experts in many topics if we know how to do the research.

Writing in the New York Times earlier this year, Ben Yagoda, author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Errors and the Best Ways to Avoid Them and a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Delaware, clarifies for us as follows:

“Writers who are intimately familiar with their subject produce more knowing, more confident and, as a result, stronger results…the idea is to investigate the subject till you can write about it with complete confidence and authority. Being a serial expert is actually one of the cool things about the very enterprise of writing…”[1]

And therein lays the wonder of these days of information overload: for writers, this overload is among the most essential tools in our toolboxes.

The trick, as with all tools, is to become an expert at using it!

As my own writing segued from non-fiction into fiction, I’ve been forever grateful for the research skill I was able to hone through the years. For any of us who are writing fiction with a basis in fact, those skills are crucial to the authentic voice we all seek.

[1] Ben Yagoda. Should we write what we know? The New York Times online, July 22, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/should-we-write-what-we-know/?_r=0