Building an online presence for writers

Using SFWA Effectively for Book Publicity

December 2, 2020

People sometimes ask whether or not the membership fee for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America is worth it. I think it is, but mileage will vary. That mileage is certainly dependent on how effectively you use it. So here’s a sample action plan I’m putting together for my next book.

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Notes from the Internet Presence for Writers Panel

May 7, 2019

This is from the panel on Internet Presence for Writers from Norwescon a few weeks ago. Participants were K.G Anderson, K. Tempest Bradford (moderator), Chimedum Ohaegbu, and myself.

Panel description: We’ve all heard the warnings, “Be careful what you put online; it’s forever!” Is this really a concern? We’re encouraged to have a heavy online presence, but sometimes it can feel like walking on eggshells. Hear pros share how they balance their fanbase and personal sharing, where it’s gone right and gone wrong.

One of the keys is to be findable on the Internet. You should have a website, and that website should have a means of contacting you. You would be surprised how many writer websites do not have the writer’s name on the front page.

Along the same lines, that website should look professional rather than amateurish. If you must have squid, Karen observed, make them professional looking squid.

Curate your presence and don’t be random about it. You want to think about your online presence. Look at your social media and the last 20-25 things you’ve posted. How many are positive? How many are negative? How many are informative? That’s the presence you’re projecting online. People are drawn to people who care about people.

Have a newsletter. Raven Oak’s was held up as an example.

Facebook groups are more useful than Facebook pages. (note from Cat: I’m been hearing this for a while and it did lead me to start up a group, which so far has been livelier and more active than anywhere else for me on Facebook.)

Post proportionately and consistently.

Don’t let social media overwhelm your energy. You must have something to promote or all of this is pointless.

Use Twitter tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to keep things manageable by scheduling posts. Twitter lists are also useful. Cat keeps a private list marked “interactives,” which is people who frequently interact or repost her stuff, which is the first place she pulls from when scheduling posts. Another is a public list, Women in Fantasy and Science Fiction. To see what lists you are on, go to your Lists page and click on “Member of”.

Explore Twitter hashtags like #writingcommunity, #writerwednesday, #followfriday. On Instagram, look for #bookstagram and other book-related hashtags.

Blogging is coming back, but you need to have content that people want. Mary Robinette Kowal has a series called Debut Author Tips, for instance.

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Nattering Social Justice Cook: Defending Yourself

October 22, 2017

Monday, in the wee and terrible hours of the morning, I’m dragging myself off to the first of twelve women’s self-defense classes, which meet three times a week for the next month.

While I’m not fond of the circumstances pushing the need for something like this, it’s something I’d thought about for decades, so probably it’s good to be going ahead and doing it before I get so creaky that I worry about breaking a hip. As it is I know I’ll be collecting some bruises.

It coincides with a gun class halfway through, since I figured as long as I’m living in a house with guns, I might as well know how to pick one up and shoot it in the case of a zombie apocalypse. (This is an interesting year! So far I’ve added the following skills, all at 1st level, to my character sheet: scuba, lockpicking, coffee roasting. Basic CPR is another I want to append before year’s end.)

Mainly this will be interesting because it’s a big change in mindset. The last time I hit a human being with my fist was, I think, second or third grade. While I’ve played sports, they’ve never been rough and tumble ones; softball, golf, or tennis are more my style. Maybe bowling. I did fence briefly in high school and have always regretted not sticking with it.

But, plain and simple, I’m going to be grappling with my own fight or flight instinct and learning how to look at the landscape a bit differently. I plan to journal throughout because I think I’m going to run up against my own internal anger and deal with it in a way I’ve never had to before. I know it’s there because I glimpse it every once in a while.

While I was at Snake River Comic Con, I was talking with some other women about self defense classes, since a couple of them had taught them (in fact, SRCC’s kids track included a Hogwarts Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher showing them how to use a quarterstaff). They all agreed that they’d hit a particular phenomenon (“It happens all the time,” one said.) A man shows up to a women’s self defense class in order to demonstrate to the women that the class is pointless and in each case getting taken down by the instructor. And that night, when I was thinking about the mindset required to appoint oneself the policer of women, showing up to give the message that men can hurt them no matter what skills they acquire, I could feel that anger creeping along my body, extending outwards along my limbs, tensing them in a way I had to consciously concentrate on in order to stop.

I am aware of my surroundings at most times that, when on the street, does factor getting grabbed, because I have been groped, grabbed, squeezed, and otherwise forced into physical contact that I didn’t want multiple times. That sounds paranoid, but I think many women know what I mean. For me it’s a result of this encounter when I was a young adult, maybe 19 or 20. I was walking to work around 9 in the morning, downtown, when I passed an elderly man. There was nothing about his appearance or demeanor to distinguish him from a normal human being. But unlike one, he grabbed my ass as he passed, not a tentative little pat but a full-out invasive, startling, unexpected move that stopped me dead, spun me around, while he walked on, smiling broadly.

Where was the pleasure in that act sited for him? Was it the feel of my flesh? Or in the fact that he’d violated my boundaries, there in daylight? I’m pretty sure it was the latter.

How shitty does your soul have to be to get enjoyment out of hurting another person, either physically or verbally? Seriously. Trying to rebuild the crumbling brickwork of internal sense of worth while not realizing this is the very thing that’s destroyed it. Taking pleasure from hurting a fellow human being is vile. It corrodes your humanity in a way Uncle Screwtape would have heartily approved of.

Nowadays, I’d react differently. I’d take a picture, call the cops, and follow him till they arrived. Because that sort of shit needs to stop.

Beyond two actual attacks, since then plenty of subway gropes, elevator boob brushes, lingering hugs. Laughing invitations to sit in men’s laps. Sometimes meant to intimidate, but often unthinking, like the fourth grade teacher known for snapping girls bra straps but who also gave me my first Heinlein novels to read. And you know, I don’t really care about a lot of that myself because I’m older now and know how to roll my eyes while at the same time keeping an elbow ready for that man standing waiting for the airplane bathroom and rubbing his crotch on my shoulder. (Yes, taken from life.) But that’s armor I’ve acquired. Many of my fellows, particularly the younger or particularly different ones, don’t have the same toughness.

Maybe we can try to create a world where they don’t need to. In some ways I’m encouraged by the way 45 has actually forced some formerly more wishy-washy allies into solidarity, made them go, well, okay, maybe the mentality informing “you can grab ’em by the pussy” isn’t really so much humorous as it is toxic.

I ramble. That’s okay. We are all made up of impressions, encounters. Moments frozen in our memories and shaping our thoughts for decades to come. What does it mean that there’s people out there who want others — particularly women — to have moments of fear, powerlessness, humiliation, pain? How do you heal those broken souls so they stop spreading their poison? Is that the right strategy? It seems the best longtime one, the one with the most result for the human race.

Call-out culture is something I was thinking about this morning. It seems to me the teaching there is aimed outward, not at the person being called out so much as the people witnessing. Perhaps more effective but also one that takes the center target and leaves them humiliated, angry, hurt. Yet that’s not the intent so much as collateral damage from pot shots at the system. I find talking privately usually more effective, but there are times when that’s not appropriate. Thinking about the guy who grabbed me, it would have seemed pretty appropriate to call him out because it would have made him realize sometimes there are consequences to oneself from committing and taking pleasure in assault.

Maybe this rumination is all particularly appropriate for a Sunday morning. Figuring out this shit is hard and looking at the Unitarian church’s sermon today to see if it’s applicable, I see they’re going to be discussing arguments for and against changing the wording of the First Principle from “person” to “˜being”. Probably a lengthy walk in order to think would be more useful, and luckily it’s a nice day for it, blue skies and leaves still on the trees being all beautiful and autumn-y.

Still waiting on that Adulting for Dummies book I was metaphorically promised as a child. Maybe they’ll hand them out in the first session of that defense class.

We shall see.

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The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping

November 26, 2014

Image that says 1) Tweet 2) ??? 3) Profit — If this is all that your social media plan consists of, you may want to put more time and thought into it.

Are you a writer on Twitter because you’ve been told you need to be on there? Are you trying to establish “a social media presence” while not quite sure what that involves? Relax and don’t worry. Twitter can be easy and often a lot of fun as well as useful, as long as you take the time to learn some of the basics for Twitter use.

One useful tool for making the most of Twitter is the list feature, where you can sort a subset of your followers into their own group. If you’ve never used it, you may want to start by reading through Twitter’s own basic tutorial on lists.

Twitter lists are a great feature that are worth making the most of. I’ve got a few set up for industry professionals, close friends on Twitter, members of various writing groups and organizations, former students, and people in a variety of fields. But there’s one that is more important than any of the others.

Building Your Followers

A pack of followers made up of people who followed you back because you followed them is not a particularly useful list. You want followers who retweet your content, help spread your message, and who provide interesting and useful content that you may want to share in turn. For this reason, it’s worth putting a few minutes each day into maintaining it. I use two tools to help me do this: Buffer and Justunfollow.

Buffer allows me to schedule tweets (which I also like because I can post stuff when not around and find new followers that way). When I initially post a link to a blogpost, for example, I can go ahead and set up a couple of additional mentions further on down the line. More importantly, I use Buffer when doing my daily follower check, looking to see who’s following me that I want to follow back. I look at each new follower’s tweets and usually favorite a couple or find tweets that I want to retweet, sticking them in my Buffer queue. (I should note that I am not using the free version of Buffer but the next version up, which lets me schedule roughly ten days of tweets in advance.

Who I Don’t Follow Back

I don’t follow everyone back automatically. Here’s the list that’s evolved over time of profiles I don’t bother following back:

Sell, sell, sell. Is your stream full of nothing but links to your book on Amazon? Then I’m probably not worrying about.
Nonexistent. No photo, no background info, no tweets? I’m not going to bother.
Promising me social media success. I’m not buying Twitter followers, nor am I paying for expensive seminars that tell me things that are common sense.
Hate speech. That should, I think, go without saying.

Disagree with me politically? That’s fine. I enjoy conversation. Post nothing but silly puns or kitten pictures? I’m fine with that. I’m even good with total nonsense. This sorting stage is where I build a lot of my lists, though not that crucial one I want to talk about. That one comes later.

The Interactives List

Lists are a terrifically useful feature of Twitter, allowing you to create subgroupsand view tweetstreams made up of only tweets from people on that list. Many of my lists are devoted to either a specific group like former students or players of a MUD I used to work with or an industry niche, like book reviewers or editors. And then there’s the most important list of all.

This list is top of my heap and it’s titled Interactives, for people that interact, who RT and reply and generally signal boost. I try to periodically thank people for RTing, which means running through who’s done it recently, and I add people to it at that point. The people on that list have demonstrated that they enjoy my content and want to spread my message. That’s a very good reason for working at building a relationship with them.

When I’m just poking at Twitter, looking to see what interesting conversations are happening or what content is noteworthy or a good candidate for retweeting, I go to that list first. If I’m filling up my Buffer stream with some interesting content, I can find it there, and continue to build the relationship while also giving my followers interesting and/or entertaining content.

If you’re worried about it getting too cluttered, run the tool I mentioned, Justunfollow, periodically to weed out people not following you back and inactives. That should do the trick for all but the most popular of Tweeters.

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Twitter Basics and Best Practices for Writers

November 23, 2014

Why Talk About Twitter Basics and Best Practices?

Cover for Creating an Online Presence — Cat's first nonfiction book talks about how to set up and maintain an online presence -- without cutting into your writing time.

This year I switched the focus of my social media efforts to Twitter, because it seemed to me Facebook was an increasingly ineffectual way to reach fans. Because of that, I’ve been spending a lot more time looking at the people following me on there as well as thinking about Twitter, its philosophy, and its uses overall.

Why does a writer want to be on Twitter? The reason is more than just “sell books”. It’s often a way to network with existing fans (who will buy more books in the future), cultivate new fans, connect with peers and other industry professionals, to find out industry and writing news and yes, of course, to procrastinate in a thousand different ways.

I used to automatically follow people who followed me but nowadays I spend a few minutes to click through and look at their page and the tweets it contains. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are doing it “wrong,” or at least in a way that ends up detracting from their purpose. Most of these are easy fixes. Here’s some tips for setting up an account on there and as well as for maintaining a presence.

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Do Writers Need to Blog? No.

September 26, 2013

A friend once said, "It's odd, the harder I work, the luckier I get." And it's true. But that work is perhaps better put into writing than blogging about writing.

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey.

Let me repeat that. Hooey.

You do not need to have a blog. You do need to have a website that lists your publications and provides a way to contact you, so people can track you down if they want to. That’s it. The world is full of blogs with writing advice from people with only a few publications under their belt. Sometimes they give good advice, sometimes they don’t. It’s not ordained that you must contribute your quota of “avoid adverbs!” to the pool.

What else do you really need? You need to be writing steadily and sending stuff out.

Yes, if you have 50K Twitter followers, you may be more desirable in an editor’s eyes. But the time and effort you would need to spend growing that Twitter following from scratch would be better spent writing. You are not going to gain swarms of followers unless you are putting some effort into entertaining and informing them.

If blogging is going to be a chore for you, then don’t do it. Or engage in a very simple form of blogging: post a brief excerpt of what you wrote that day (or week, or whatever). You’ll find people are just as satisfied with an interesting story chunk as that preachy bit about not piling adjectives together. And, when the piece is published, that announcement gives you something else to put on the blog.

John Scalzi gets mentioned as a blogging success story. What doesn’t get mentioned is that he put an entire book up a bit at a time, and gained much of his following that way. Scalzi does have the sort of web presence that would make a publisher lick their chops. That sort of web presence doesn’t come easily.

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Building an Online Presence for Writers: Outline for the Book

September 14, 2013

Picture of a Maneki Neko Cat — One thing that the book talks about is why you should be consistent with your profile images across multiple social networks. This is the same cat I use in some of my e-letters and postcards.

More on the e-book that contains all the class info and then some. Here’s the working outline:

Before You Start
What Do You Want to Accomplish?
Your Online Persona
Your Contact Database
Online Tool: MailChimp
How to Measure Success
What is Web 2.0?
Protecting Your Privacy

Your Website
At a Minimum
Your Name
Domain Names
Press Kits

Blogging
What is a Blog?
Parts of a Blog
Parts of a Post
Choosing a Platform
Getting Started
Deciding What to Write About
Writing Your Post
Example of a Book Promotion Post
Example of a Convention Write-up
Images
Linking
Comments from Other People
Content from Other People
Other Best Practices
Group Blogs
Other People’s Blogs
RSS
Monetizing Your Blog
Publicizing Your Blog
Online Tool: WiseStamp
Near + Far Promotional Posts, Annotated

Social Networks
Networking with Sincerity
How Much is Not Enough?
Best Practices
Online Tool: Namechk
Setting Things Up
Getting People to Take Action
Do You Need to Belong to Every Network?
Reviving Dead Media Channels

Facebook
What It Is
Who’s the Mayor of Your Data?
Fan Pages
Groups
Events
Best Practices
Advertising
Privacy
Facebook Metrics

G+
What It Is
Your G+ Profile
Circles
Hangouts
Pages
Best Practices
G+ Tools and Shortcuts

Pinterest
What It Is
Best Practices
Metrics
How Writers, Editors, and Publishers can use Pinterest

Twitter
What It Is
Hashtags and Twitter Chats
Your Profile
What to Tweet About
Getting Followers
Getting Retweeted
Twitter Tools
Wordpress and Twitter
TwitPic
Twitter Metrics: Basic Metrics
Online Tools: Followerwonk
Online Tools: Klout

Other Social Networks
Webforums and Discussion Boards
Foursquare
Tumblr

Bookmarking Sites
Delicious
Digg
Reddit: How Reddit Works
Reddit: AMAs
Reddit: How a Writer Can Use Reddit
Reddit: Communities
Stumbleupon: What It Is
Stumbleupon: Best Practices

Crowdfunding
What It Is
IndieGogo
Kickstarter
Best Practices

Reader Communities
Amazon
GoodReads
LibraryThing
Shelfari
Others
Best Practices

Audio & Video
Podcasting – Audio
Podcasting – Video
Reasons to Use YouTube
Creating a YouTube Channel
Monetizing YouTube
YouTube Metrics
Vimeo/Vine

Search Engines
SEO Basics
Writing Copy with SEO Keywords
Investigating Keywords
Best Practices
Google Analytics
Basics
Best Practices
Resources

Other Metrics
Bit.ly
Klout

Building Your Fan Base
Finding Your Fans
Encouraging Your Fans
Dealing With Trolls
Gamification

Managing Your Time
Tracking Things
Online Tool: Rescue Time
Productive Procrastination

Mobile Devices
What It Is
Making Websites Mobile-friendly
Creating Mobile Apps
Windows Phone App Studio

Miscellania
Introduction
Arguing on the Internet
If You Screw Up
Grouping Up
Managing Multiple Identities
Press Releases
Online Tools: QR Codes
Networks around Us
Self Promotion & Career Building
Selling More Books
Creating an Online Presence For Your Group
Teaching Writing Online
On Award Pimpage
Privacy Best Practices
Online Tools: URL Shorteners
Creative Commons Licenses
Online Tools: Wikis

Appendix: Sites Mentioned.

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Upcoming: Building an Online Presence for Writers E-book

August 4, 2013

I’m putting together many of my notes from the Building an Online Presence for Writers class as well as the various blog posts I have done about online promotion and notes from the Near + Far book launch campaign in an e-book by the same name that I hope to release at the end of September or October, along with another e-book, Podcasting for Speculative Fiction Writers, written with Folly Blaine.

So far, it looks as though the Building an Online Presence book will be between 50 and 60 thousand words altogether, and include a number of screenshots. It’s aimed at both writers just beginning their careers and wanting to build their online presence as well as mid and later career writers who want to refine their online presence. Right now it’s a little under half-drafted, with about 27k laid out in the Scrivener project (which is GREAT for nonfiction works like this).

One of the things that I think will make it useful to writers is that I try to give you examples for the various concepts I talk about. I include all of the blog posts from the Near + Far book launch as well as screenshots showing the book’s presence on various social networking sites, and in each case provides some notes about SEO strategies, tags, images, All and other promotional considerations that affected the construction of the post. Getting a chance to see the campaign in action will be a valuable chance to see the concepts in action.

Topics that are covered include: building a fan base, the minimum web presence you should have as a writer, what to blog about, how to use social networks such as Facebook, G+, Pinterest, and Twitter to publicize your books, free tools that will help you maximize your online presence, maintaining your privacy, podcasting and videocasting, maintaining multiple identities on the Internet, how to write a press release for your book, how to take mobile devices into consideration when shaping your online presence, and how to measure your success at all of these in a way that will help you shape your Future strategy.

If you’re interested in signing up to be notified when the book comes out, please sign up here.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

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