3 Social Media tips for writers

My life, Social Media, Writing
November 8, 2012

1. Don’t get carried away by the ease of online communication

Online promotion and the creativity used to write a book are two different things. It is very easy to forget you’re in a social network to communicate with those you read and promote your book.
If your mind is happy sending tweets and posting stupid comments on Facebook, you have a problem you need to solve before being able to create something of quality. A tweet has 140 characters. A book has over 100.000. The effort that you put into a tweet can be equivalent to ten times more characters that you can write for your book.
It takes time to create promotional message. If you exaggerate with it you risk being distracted from what really matters.

2. Let the book go when it’s ready and don’t wait until it’s perfect

To keep a book as draft and to rewrite it for another two years after is done doesn’t help anybody. Similarly, the temptation to publish yourself you immediately using the support offered by social media is a distraction from the ultimate goal.
Publish online, but publish when the book is finished and publish from a source you can control: your website, your Amazon store, etc. On social networks should appear only links, references to source.
This will allow you to have control and monitor the number of downloads for the e-book or the book sales when you sell directly.

3. The killer gene must be controlled

The unstoppable desire to be better than your peers may have been originally a male characteristic. That was back when we were hunting mammoths.  In the modern world both sexes act mainly as being in a competition for the sake of competition.
Other’s literary creation is not the enemy of yours literary creation. A writer must assume the role of an educator in order to create new readers, and maintain those that are, for all books.

The only limits you have are the limits that you set yourself.