Platform in Perspective

Platform, platform, platform. The blogosphere is filled with that word. An unpublished writer must have a platform to get an agent or a publisher. Your blog doesn’t have ten thousand followers? Don’t even talk to an agent or a publisher. You can’t write.

In late December I received an Annual Report from WordPress (another reason why I love WordPress). Let me share my stats. I had 8,300 views in 2012. I posted 89 new essays (for a total of 140 in the 15 months since I started my blog). My busiest day was October 17, 2012, with 117 views. My most popular post was titled, “What Drives Your Main Character?” My most commented-upon post was, “Are You NaNoing This Year.”

My posts have been viewed by people in 102 countries, with the U.S., the United Kingdom and Canada showing the most views.

What do all these stats mean? Judging by the numbers, I am a rank amateur who has no right to call myself an author. That’s the trouble with numbers. I don’t spend my day promoting my blog posts on social media. I don’t have the time. There are only two numbers that mean anything to me: my word count on my Work in Progress and the number of blog posts (I try to blog every three days) I generate. My expectations are low, but realistic. I’d rather spend my energy writing the best book I can and sharing what I’ve learned with the good people who are kind enough to read my blog. The big platform benchmarks touted on blogs mean little to me. They’re not worth the price.

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Avoiding the Social Media Time Suck

Writers blog about it–the amount of time they spend on social media: monitoring blogs, writing blog posts, tweeting, facebooking, leaving comments on other blogs. It’s a huge time suck, and yet writers still do it. Guilty on all counts.

I’m still trying to figure out how to spend less time on social media time and more time on my passion–fiction writing. I don’t have the answer yet, but let me share what I’ve learned:

Be selective about the blogs you follow regularly. At first, I was like the proverbial kid in the candy store. Every week I would discover a new writer’s blog and add it to my favorites. I spent hours on social media and my writing output suffered. Now, I follow a few blogs religiously: Writer Unboxed, Rachelle Gardner, Nathan Bransford, Kathryn Magendie, K.M. Weiland, Jody Hedlund, Joanna Penn, Jane Friedman. Well, I guess that’s more than a few, but you get the point.

Set aside time for social media and time for fiction writing. That’s an easy rule to set down and a much tougher one to obey. How many times have you said, “I’m just going to check my stats, respond to a few comments and check a couple of blogs and then I’ll start working on my work-in-progress?” Three hours later, you haven’t put a word on the page. It takes great discipline to treat these as separate activities, but the writer must.

Use technology to manage your blog feeds. There are a number of tools available. Subscribing to your favorite blogs through email is one that I find helpful. Getting your favorite blogs on Twitter is another useful way to keep up, while not impacting your writing time.

Devote large blocks of time to writing and use social media as a reward. I’m a binge writer. If I’m not feeling it, I will produce drivel, but when I’m on fire creatively, I can crank out 3,000 words in one sitting. OK, it might not be riveting prose, but in some cases I’ve done my best work while on such creative rolls. The trick is to tell yourself you are going to write for three hours, four hours, whatever, and stick to it. Then treat yourself to a couple of hours on social media.

Go someplace else to write. This is a sound strategy. Pick a place–your local coffee shop or the library. Find a quiet table. Sit down with your laptop, find some music that inspires you and plug in your ear buds, and write for two or three hours. Try it sometime. Do your social media at home or on a mobile device, but not at your writing place.

Is social media a time suck for you? How do you find the time to write?

Why Twitter is Your Best Friend

One of the key lessons I learned during my first year as a blogger was that Twitter was my best friend. It wasn’t always that way. I resisted Twitter for a long time. I fell for the common perception that Twitter was all about telling the world what you ate for lunch, what you did five minutes ago, and what you were planning to do later in the day. There may be some truth to that, but Twitter offers so much more to those who understand and capitalize on its value.

Twitter is all about sharing and learning and learning and sharing. That’s the culture of Twitter. For writers, the real value lies in who you choose to follow. When you follow people like Porter Anderson, Mike Shatzkin, and Jane Friedman, you look through a window into the publishing world. If you approach Twitter in the right frame of mind (share and play nice), you will also discover people will follow you. Some might be looking to do business with you, but I’ve gained followers who simply stopped by my blog and liked what they read.

So how can writers get the most out of Twitter?

• Share, share, share. Did I say that enough? And don’t just share your own content. Share links to other useful articles.
• Follow thought leaders in your industry or profession. It is amazing what you will learn.
• Retweet. If somebody sends a link to a useful article, retweet it. They will appreciate it.
• Follow people for fun. I follow people as diverse as Robinson Cano, Spike Lee, and Thom Yorke.
• Set up your blog so it automatically feeds into Twitter and Facebook.
• Follow your favorite writer blogs and you will receive them on Twitter each day.

I use other social media tools, but I always find myself coming back to Twitter. There’s no end to the interesting things I learn each day on Twitter.

What do you think of Twitter? What’s your favorite social media tool?

7 Lessons from a First-Year Blogger

This month marked my first anniversary as a blogger. While my stats are hardly impressive, I have 111 posts and more than 5,000 views to my credit. In the process, I’ve learned a lot and would like to share seven key lessons:

1. Keep doing it. The blogosphere is littered with bloggers who started out fast and flamed out. If you are going to start a blog, you must make a long-term commitment. Take the long view. Are you really passionate enough about the subject to keep going back to it again and again. Do you have enough to say? Do you have enough time? Which brings me to my second lesson.

2. Your writing comes first. I have not found the right balance yet. I admit I have sacrificed my writing time in the interest of keeping up my blog and that’s a bad habit. I need to work on that.

3. Read other blogs. Bloggers must stay current on what is being written about their subject. What are the hot stories? What are the trends or books people are talking about? Writing books doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Writers are part of a vast world that includes traditional and self-publishing. Besides, reading other blogs will give you topic ideas.

4. Build your online community. My philosophy is to focus on making a few meaningful connections. This is best done by faithfully reading blogs you like and leaving comments. It also involves being nice to other bloggers, reading and reviewing their work and sharing tips and insights. It takes time, but it’s worth it.

5. Twitter is your best friend. I resisted Twitter for a long time, but a friend persisted in touting its benefits. Once I realized what it was all about and what it could do for a writer, I was hooked. Again, Twitter is about sharing and giving, not about self-promotion. If you follow the right people, you can get all your news about your subject of interest through Twitter.

6. Branch out. My blog started as a resource for new writers. All of my posts were focused on helping the novice writer. I wrote with an eye toward giving advice I would have found most helpful when I was starting out. I always knew it would morph into something more. I have added Author Spotlights on authors I admire and Book Reviews. I realize I am not only a writer, but an avid reading and reading is just as important to me as writing.

7. You own it. Fiction writing bloggers tend to write about the same topics, but what I find fascinating is that every writer’s perspective on these topics is so different. We all see writing through our unique prism. And that’s what the individual blogger brings to the table. Share your insights. Share your journey. Give knowledge to others. You will find it most rewarding. Now I need to go and spend some time on my Work In Progress.

What lessons have you learned as a blogger? Have you figured out the balance between blogging and writing fiction?

 

Reflections on a Writer’s Conference

Another CAPA-U conference is in the books and the daylong event featured a powerful keynote, a thought-provoking agents’ roundtable and a variety of workshops related to craft, publishing and marketing.

CAPA is the Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. CAPA is made up of aspiring and published book authors, journalists, freelance writers, poets, and playwrights, as well as editors, agents, publishers and other professionals who meet regularly to enhance mutual growth and success.

The 2012 CAPA-U kicked off with a moving keynote by noted Connecticut author, professor, and editor Lary Bloom, who spoke about his struggles to find a way to write about his experiences serving in Vietnam. Bloom was a supply lieutenant in the U.S. Army. His childhood friend and Hebrew school classmate, Harmon Polster, was in the Air Force. Polster’s plane was shot down and he was officially MIA until recently when his bones were identified. Bloom finally was able to express his experiences through a play, Wild Black Yonder, that premiered at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook, CT.

The most powerful way to bring the horrors of war to the reader, he said, is to personalize them. This hit Bloom after talking to Polster’s widow. “The story I would tell affected only a few people. But I had to keep reminding myself that it was a worthy enterprise—that the small story stood for a much larger tragedy,” he said.

Bloom’s stirring keynote was followed by the agents’ roundtable. Of course, the two leading topics were the Department of Justice lawsuit against Apple and the Big Six publishers and the growing impact of Amazon on the publishing industry. The agents were universal in their criticism of the DOJ lawsuit, which they said was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the agency model and the economics of publishing.They saved their harshest criticism for Amazon, which they described as a company that cares nothing about publishers and authors and is bent on driving publishers out of business by taking a loss on book sales to gain market share.

In response to a question about the changing role of agents, several agents said they are more valuable than ever to authors. Agents are the author’s advocate. They understand the business and are experienced at negotiating the most favorable contracts for their author clients.

In addition to the learning that goes on, a writer’s conference is an opportunity to renew old acquaintances and make new contacts. It was fun to catch up with old friends and find out what they were working on and to meet new people. In fact, one of the sessions featured an agent and author who met at CAPA two years ago and the meeting led to a book deal for the author.

I have to do this more often.

What do you find the most beneficial impact of a writer’s conference?