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

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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.

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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Trying to set up an online presence for your group or organization? Here’s some basics to think about.

One: Include a blog on your website that has new content on a regular basis.

This first step is key to a better social media presence, because it influences your search engine rankings. Better search engine rankings draw more traffic to your site, as do good keywords, and if your blog features information about the group, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have the appropriate keywords.

Establish realistic criteria for “regular”: daily? weekly? biweekly? What can you actually expect to do?

Figure out how you will generate such content. Some suggestions:

• Group member announcements, interviews, and guest posts.
• Group events and news.
• Posts drawing on other social media, such as announcements of new videos on the Youtube channel (see point 4) or Pinterest boards (see point 5).
• Calls for volunteer positions and interviews with volunteers.
• Yearly best-of lists or review columns.

This blog should drive the group’s presence on social networks. Posts should automatically propagate to other networks, thereby relieving the pressure for someone to be managing and posting to individual streams, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as presenting a more unified and consistent approach.

As you may know, the effectiveness of Facebook as a social media platform has recently changed for those of us who don’t usually pay for it but maintain a social media presence in order to publicize ourselves.

Many of Facebook’s changes affect fanpages. Think of a fanpage as a tiny website hosted by Facebook. Companies could create one in order to have a presence on Facebook, and their fans could go click “Like” on the page. You have one in the form of your author page. Here’s mine, for example.

The model for interacting with fans has been to post messages, which appear in your fans’ newsfeed. They respond by commenting and liking and hopefully by clicking on links in order to go buy your book or listen to your podcast or read the interview or blog post or whatever.

It’s hard to find a good overview of what’s happened, but it boils down to several things:

• There are indications that Facebook has changed the algorithm by which EdgeRank determines what posts show up in users’ newsfeed.
• Items show up in the newsfeeds of users who are mostly likely to comment or otherwise interact with them. Some feel that destroys the value of a fan page by as much as half.
• Facebook’s changes are intended to increase their revenue by forcing advertisers to promote posts.
• Getting advertisers used to Facebook branding and then starting to charge them may have been Facebook’s plan all along.
• People using Facebook will need to adjust to the changes in one way or another.
• Facebook wants people using the Reach Generator tool or paying to promote posts.

So I wanted to test out the changes for myself. Like most writers, I use social media to sell books but also to brand myself, spread news of upcoming events, etc. I also teach online classes, so I try to sell those as well. I had just announced a couple of new ones, so I figured I’d use that post for the test.

After I’d posted something, I clicked on “Promote this Post” to see what was involved, and saw it’d be $7 to promote. Wotthehell, as Mehitabel would say, and look, they even took Paypal.

One reason I’ve been a little dubious about all this is that in August I tried advertising on various social media (Facebook and Twitter) and search engines (Bing and Google) as well as on Hope Clark’s newsletter. I did see a lot more traffic on my site, but I don’t know how much of that translated into sales of books or classes. Overall, the newsletter, which was the cheapest, was also the most effective.

And, not to my surprise, here again it didn’t make much, if any difference, even though when I looked at Facebook’s results for my promoted post, I’m told, “Promoted posts stay higher in news feed to help people notice them. So far, your post has had 113.8x as many views because you promoted it.” That translated into a total of five visits clicking through the Facebook link yesterday. Five.

And that’s my point. Like most writers, my Facebook fan page just isn’t big enough for me to worry about this much. I’ll keep maintaining my Facebook presence, but I won’t spend money on advertising there but find most effective places. I’ll also make sure I don’t confine my social media activity to Facebook but use Delicious, Google+, Stumbleupon, Twitter, and Tumblr as well.

My advice for writers is not to waste money on social media advertising but to work on their blog and attracting readers through good content.

Enjoy this advice on social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

So one of my resolutions, post-Confusion, was to be better about social networking and spreading word of my projects. Towards that end I’ve been posting scraps of the WIP on a daily basis (and plan to do so until it’s done or someone buys it), doing more writing for the SFWA blog (just finished up a review, and I’ve got interviews scheduled with authors Myke Cole and Jason Heller) as well as a series I proposed on Thomas Burnett Swann for the Tor.com blog, and — in keeping with my belief that one of the best ways to promote yourself is to promote other people — trying to mention interesting stuff on various social networks.

So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.

I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.

Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.

One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?

And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.

Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.

What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?

Enjoy this advice about social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

Feminism
Laura Hudson discusses The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their ‘Liberated Sexuality’ at Comics Alliance.
Melissa McEwan discusses The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck for Shakesville.

Politics
The Elizabeth Warren Quote every American needs to see.
Bill CLinton says GOP Climate Change denial affects America’s image abroad
Kung Fu Monkey talks about why he misses Republicans

Technology
This is a really cool project based here in Seattle, Health Month. It’s making a game out of achieving your goals, getting so many points for each one met. It connects with the Fitbit, which I have and love, which also uses geeky addiction to numbers as motivation to get fit.
A tool that I’m still exploring, ifttt. Basically use if/then statements to create actions triggered by web events that come from channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instragram, e-mail, the weather, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg appeared at the Facebook developers conference to discuss Timeline, which supplies a new appearance for Facebook.
Samuel L. Ipsum is a lively alternative to the traditional filler text, Lorem Ipsum.

Writing
Are you a spec-fic editor that needs slush readers? Drop me info in the comments so I can add you to the list I’m compiling here on Google+.
Kurt Vonnegut’s advice for short story writers

More links from the Blogging 101 class, this time dealing with Facebook and Twitter.

Mentioned in class:
Facebook news ““ allfacebook.com
How to Stop Facebook from Posting Recent Activity to the News Feed – http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-recent-activity-2010-01