self-promotion
Good News Travels … Slowly Sometimes
You know how when you have some big news, so you tell people in a few ways/places, and then you feel like if you mention it more, it’ll just be obnoxious, and surely word has spread by now to everyone who should know?
You know how that doesn’t always work?
Yeah.
As most of you know, I had pretty big writing-life news a couple of times this year. I posted here and on Facebook, I tweeted, and AgentQuery Connect spontaneously combusted both times. I also told my immediate family (obviously) and the parts of my extended family that I see on a regular basis.
I got to that point where I thought word had spread. Naturally, though, there were gaps.
Some were inevitable, like fellow writers who have too many friends on Facebook to keep up with everything. Occasionally, someone will drop me a line and ask how things are going, so I have to pull out the, “Well, I don’t know if you heard about this, but … uh, yeah.”
With others, I just didn’t do a very good job. Family in particular. I don’t see my mom’s side as often as my dad’s, but I figured my mom would tell her sister, and word would get around.
Well, that didn’t work, judging by my aunt’s announcement and everyone’s surprise at Christmas Eve dinner. I guess my aunt didn’t find out until much more recently, so the cousins and their kids didn’t know until we all got together.
I think there’s a lesson buried in here about self-promotion.
We’ve all seen self-promotion gone wrong. The authors who spam your Twitter feed, who are a constant stream of “Buy my book!” We don’t want to do that.
At the same time, we need to make sure word gets out, so people who want to know will. It’s a balance, like everything else.
With that in mind …
Yes, my debut novel is coming out with Disney-Hyperion in Summer 2014. It’s even listed on Goodreads now. Feel free to add it to your To-Read shelf if you have an account there.
It’s also on some lists. If you feel like voting for it, awesome. If you don’t, no worries.
But at least I let you know.
Speak up:
1 commentTweet Me Like You Mean It
Everyone has their list of Twitter pet-peeves, right? So I figured I’d add mine, knowing that the offenders are little-likely to see it.
Of course, this is all just my opinion. What bugs me may be fine for another person.
The Bait-and-Switch Follow. Have any of you caught people at this? You get a notification that someone’s followed you. You take a look at their feed and decide sure, you’ll follow back. A day or so later, you get another notification that they’ve followed you. So they followed you, unfollowed, and waited to see if you would follow back before committing to following you. (Do you follow?) The new Twitter interface shows “Follows You” prominently on people’s profiles, so it seems that practice has trailed off for me, but it still happened the other day. Maybe there’s a lag?
The Super “Welcoming” Auto-Tweet. I think this one is pretty specialized to people like writers who are trying to sell something. You follow someone and immediately get a tweet—usually a direct message—with something along the lines of, “Thanks for following! Check out my blog/book/butterific-bacon-buns (insert link).” I’ve limited my reaction to rolling my eyes at such tactics (and have never once clicked the link), but it’s happening so much now, I think I’m going to automatically unfollow anyone who does it.
The Feed-Flooder. First of all, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have enough free time to tweet upwards of 100 times a day. (I know it doesn’t always mean the tweeter is actually tweeting … see below.) I only have so much time to devote to checking in with Twitter. I like to find relevant industry links/news, interesting conversations, and a little silliness with tweeps I know fairly well. If someone is filling my feed by retweeting everything in sight, pushing the Tweet This! button on every blog in the universe, and otherwise just making noise, I have to make it go away. Remember, when everything is special, nothing is.
The Robo-Tweet. I haven’t confirmed this—it’s just a suspicion. There are a lot of tweeting utilities out there to manage your social media experience. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, I don’t even know how many others. I think I’ve spotted at least one that will auto-tweet random “ice-breaker question” tweets from your account on a scheduled basis … like every half-hour. Does this actually work for people? What happened to authentic engagement?
The Deja-Tweet. Another one that’s particularly prevalent in the writer-world. Send out a little promo-blurb tweet when your book comes out, or when some particular milestone is reached. That’s fine. I’m even okay with you doing it twice that day—once for the morning crowd, then later for the evening. But when I see the same blurb (or even a small rotating set of them) day after day after day … yeah, even among all the tweets in my feed, I spot ’em.
You know what I like best? Stumbling across people through mutual Twitter-acquaintances, having a little interaction, and then following.
I could probably come up with more nuisances if I tried, but I’m sure I’ve whined enough for now. It’s your turn! What Twitter behavior drives you up the wall? Am I out of line on any of those I’ve listed above?