Can Social Networking and Online Marketing Take Over a Writer’s Life?
Reaching out to readers and potential readers is important, but don’t let it take away from your writing time.
You’ve written a new novel and it’s coming out from the publisher next month. Or maybe you’ve self-published a collection of short stories online. Or maybe you just like to write for online sites such as Triond.
Under any of those conditions, you want people to read your work. Sure, the money you could make is nice, but you also just want to be read.
To help grow your fan base and to hopefully gain potential readers, you decide to check out some of the social networking sites, online marketing sites, forums and similar places that allow you to promote your work and yourself.
There are tons of these Web sites out there that could be of use to writers. Facebook, Myspace, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit are just a few of the online places a writer to use to toute their work. How do you know which one to use? Trying to use all of them would be time consuming.
And here is where many writers run into problems online. There are so many different ways and sites to promote one’s work, it becomes difficult to choose which sites to use and how often to go to them.
It can even turn into a nightmare if you’ve signed up with 10 or more sites and try to go to each of them every day. You end up spending more time in forums and chatting and promoting, etc., than you actually do writing and editing your work.
That’s not good for a writer.
The key is to find the right balance for yourself as a writer. Sure, you can go ahead and join all the different sites just so you’ll have some presence there, but I’d suggest not visiting more than a few a day. Otherwise, you’ll always be online and never in your word processor.
It’s easy to become too caught up in the online world of marketing and networking. Not only could you lose writing time, but if you are promoting yourself too much you could end up becoming annoying to regular users of the sites. That’s right, you’d become a spammer, and once you receive that label you’ve hurt your chances of turning others onto your writing.
Still, using the Web for promotions is a given nowadays. It has to be done. Picking which sites to use regularly is really up to you. Try a few different ones, see which places are the most comfortable for you, then hang out there from time to time.
To get a little more constructive with it, you could even come up with a schedule. For example, maybe on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays you will spend an hour a day online at Facebook and Reddit, then Tuesdays and Thursdays you hope on over to StumbleUpon and the Amazon forums.
Just remember to keep it fun and to keep writing.
Other Writing Links
Dealing With Negative Reviews as an Author
Fiction Writers Need to Know Their Weapons
Promote Your Writing by Promoting Others
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July 31st, 2009 at 7:33 am
Another thing to consider is how it looks if you’re posting 5 or 10 times a day on 10 different sites. When I see someone who’s posting several times a day on a bunch of different forums I have to wonder how successful they can really be if they have that much free time.
Is that fair of me? No, but I suspect that a prospective client who does a web search before hiring them will see all that wasted time and wonder the same thing.
July 31st, 2009 at 10:29 am
good article
July 31st, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Some good points here. Creating a product without a marketing plan is a waste of time.
July 31st, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Hello, jharmon:
Spending more time promoting then writing is an easy situation for a writer to find himself or herself in. For me, spending time in the Triond community and on my personal blog takes up most of the time I have for promotion. For some reason I can’t get my digg account working but if I ever do, the community, my personal blog and digg may be as far as I go with promotion for the time being. http://www.writinghood.com/online-writing/how-to-come-up-with-more-great-writing-ideas/
July 31st, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Good advice.
Inna
August 5th, 2009 at 8:12 am
I really like it.
August 14th, 2009 at 6:21 am
I did a similar article with ‘Social Networking Sites Take Over Our Lives’ and I must say yours is a completely different take but you share similar opinions to me too! It is true that you end up doing other stuff on the internet rather than writing. Good article!
August 15th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Thanks for this article, jharmon. I am new to writing online and your article makes me think of the time spent in social networking sites. I think good balance is necessary over writing and promoting your work. You just have to decide the amount of time allocated for each activity.
September 12th, 2009 at 12:29 am
It is difficult to find a balance between producing articles and marketing your work.