{"id":955,"date":"2011-05-23T10:50:35","date_gmt":"2011-05-23T14:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=955"},"modified":"2011-05-28T06:25:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-28T10:25:44","slug":"q-do-you-think-social-media-matters-to-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/birthmarked\/q-do-you-think-social-media-matters-to-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Q. Do You Think Social Media Matters to Writers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A. I did not, initially, find the prospect of joining social media innately appealing.\u00a0 Do not mistake me for shy or insecure because I\u2019m not, but I am rather private and low-key.\u00a0 I\u2019m the sort of girl who\u2019d rather hang out with a friend on the couch than dress up and go to a party, and social media looked like a party of strangers.\u00a0 Besides, I was busy writing, and I hadn\u2019t considered that interacting socially with new people online might be worthwhile.<\/p>\n

\"\"It turns out it is worthwhile, even delightful, especially when you find ways to interact that suit you.\u00a0 Personality matters when a writer considers what to do with social media because you can stretch yourself, or burn out, or invent a natural fit.\u00a0 In each case, you start as a non-entity and then convey some of your real personality through a series of interactions over time.\u00a0 A careful, thoughtful person is not going to blossom into a wit of extemporaneous charm, even if she wants to, but that\u2019s fine.\u00a0 We\u2019re drawn to unique voices.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sort of funny to be writing this because I\u2019m hardly a big online presence, but still, I do have a few ideas I can pass along to others considering starting up, ideas that would have been reassuring to me to know when I did.\u00a0 I think there\u2019s a misconception among new writers that you need to jump in fast, hard, and early, or you\u2019ll be doomed to oblivion and your book will have dismal sales.\u00a0 I think what matters is the quality of your book, and social media should never come before that. It helps to be realistic about how much you want to do and what you have to contribute.\u00a0 As in everything else, it helps to be real.<\/p>\n

For my purposes, I consider social media to be any place where a writer can interact publicly with others online.\u00a0 For me, that means Goodreads, Facebook, my blog, and Twitter.\u00a0 Other venues certainly exist, too, but that\u2019s all I can keep track of.\u00a0 A little of it I started before Birthmarked<\/em> was released, but most of it kicked in well after.<\/p>\n

I joined Goodreads<\/a> ages ago as a reader with a private page listing my collection of favorite books, so it was fairly easy to convert my page there into a public one as an author after I sold Birthmarked<\/em>.\u00a0 Goodreads makes it easy to find fellow like-minded readers, run giveaways<\/a>, arrange an author chat, and cross-post my blog.\u00a0 It also gives readers an easy way to post reviews and ratings, and to send me a line.\u00a0 It\u2019s a no-pressure community of readers I can drop into casually and effortlessly.<\/p>\n

Facebook<\/a> was a little trickier for me because the whole accepting-friends business just felt weird to me.\u00a0 Still does, frankly.\u00a0 My daughter set me up with a page as a writer<\/a> (as opposed to a profile as a private person) where people could \u201clike\u201d me, and it was a relief because a line was clearly drawn.\u00a0 My sister had been bugging me to talk more about my writing stuff but I\u2019d been reluctant to bore my friends and family with details.\u00a0 Now, with a writer page, I had a place to do that and people could tune in or not as they chose.\u00a0 It also gave me a place where I could interact with former students, which I\u2019d been unwilling to do on my private Facebook profile, so the writer page connected me both to kind readers I\u2019d never met and people I already cared for.\u00a0 Like Goodreads, it\u2019s easy and fans seem to feel comfortable popping in when they want to talk. This morning, someone posted that she has Prized<\/em> and I squealed.<\/p>\n

My blog came next.\u00a0 Last summer, several months after the release of my book, my persuasive agent convinced me to start blogging to provide a bridge between Birthmarked<\/em> and the sequel.\u00a0 He pointed out that readers, especially YA readers, would look online for more about me and Birthmarked<\/em>, and fresh information would feed their interest.\u00a0 When I argued that nobody cared about what was cooking on the back of my stove, he said I could write tie-in stories and bits about the world of Birthmarked<\/em>.\u00a0 That interested me.\u00a0 I agreed to experiment with two posts a week for two months.\u00a0 By the end, I found I liked thinking about characters<\/a> at different ages.\u00a0 For posts about writing<\/a>, I liked stepping back from what I do to think about the process.\u00a0 Even the challenge of adding images appealed to me and influenced how I thought as I wrote.\u00a0 In short, I gained personally from blogging, and it turned out my agent was right because visitors do drop by.\u00a0 When they email me, I get a sense that they\u2019ve connected with me because of what I\u2019ve written.<\/p>\n

My most recent venture has been into Twitter<\/a>, which I find pretty goofy.\u00a0 Besides getting NPR headlines there, I\u2019ve lurked at a couple #yalitchats<\/a>, impressed by how generous that free-flowing community of writers is.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found my fellow writer friends on Twitter and laugh at their posts. When my editor Nancy Mercado posts a link, it\u2019s often worth the side trip (Twitter tips<\/a>), and through Twitter, I\u2019ve connected with two other writers who also work with Nan.\u00a0 They\u2019re like my cool half-cousins. \u00a0Regardless if it’s Goodreads, Twitter or whatever, the vehicle doesn\u2019t really matter because it ends up being about the people.<\/p>\n

Does any of it make any difference?\u00a0 Of course it does.\u00a0 I may write my books in isolation, but I am part of a far-flung community and I have much to learn.\u00a0 Being connected increases my serendipitous chances of discovering lovely or disturbing new things.\u00a0 Best of all, I realize I\u2019ve gradually been building friendships with people who matter to me, and that\u2019s making me a better friend and a better writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A. I did not, initially, find the prospect of joining social media innately appealing.\u00a0 Do not mistake me for shy or insecure because I\u2019m not, but I am rather private and low-key.\u00a0 I\u2019m the sort of girl who\u2019d rather hang out with a friend on the couch than dress up and go to a party, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","category-prized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":958,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}