Hello from Garden City, Kansas, where I’m at what was once the Wheatlands motel, where Truman Capote stayed when he was writing In Cold Blood. I’m visiting cousins here — tomorrow we’ll head up to Lawrence (with a brief detour through Dodge) to see more cousins.
The trip’s been great so far. Lots to see and time with some awesome folks. Wayne’s cousins Patty and Pete provided us with wine and ammunition. David Boop put us up in style in Denver and had an awesome birthday dinner with plenty of great folks from the local writing community. We did Yellowstone and saw a ton of hot springs and an indifferent teen-age moose. In Hays, I took a picture of the placard for my grandfather, Alex Francis.
I’d go on further but the hotel internet has gone kablooey so I’m writing this in the Target parking lot while Wayne goes for Gatorade. More when we have reliable Internet!
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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."
~K. Richardson
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Using SFWA Effectively for Book Publicity
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.
4-6 months ahead of time
Look to see what upcoming events, such as local reading series, conferences, and conventions work with your schedule. For example, if your book were being released in May, you might want to supply some ARCs for the Nebula Conference swag bags. Or if you’re in the Pacific Northwest area, you might contact the local organizers of the readings series in order to set up a reading.
Look at the SFWA boards to see if there’s any upcoming cooperative efforts you might become part of, or propose your own, along the lines of “Hey, I’ve got a book coming out on this date, anyone else got something coming out around then that wants to coordinate publicity?
If you’re doing that cooperative effort, make sure all your items are lined up!
The day of the release
Make sure you say something on your personal thread in the Discussion Forums so people know to spread the word! Give them as many resources to do so as you can, such as supplying a graphic or a pre-composed tweet.
Tag @SFWA in a tweet or two to get them to RT it.
After the release
Keep an eye open for the next SFWA Storybundle; they appear every six months or so.
Make sure there are copies in .mobi, .epub, and .pdf forms in the appropriate forums on the discussion boards if you want members to be able to read it when thinking about making Nebula nominations.
Social networking - is it all just navel-gazing and blogging about blogging? Or are we actually building connections that will matter?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?
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