The Writer’s Priorities. Part 2

Portrait of Samuel Johnson commissioned for Henry Thrale's Streatham Park gallery (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Timing, they say, is all. An odd coincidence occurred today. I was due to write this post, as a follow-up to last week’s effort. But, I’d also determined I would enter at least 4 writing contest during the month, and I’d only managed 2 entries by yesterday. In preparing for the other two, I went online and discovered at the top of my emails an alert to the Writers’ Village blog I follow for its excellent advice and content. The subject matter was ‘A Simple Idea That Can Sell a MillionBooks’. Bearing in mind what I said last week about money as a motivator, I thought I should at least read the piece. If you click on the title, it’ll take you to it.

It was one of those posts, of which there are many these days, promoting the idea that money can be made from writing by doing a great deal of it and getting it published, more or less regardless of the quality. It’s a persuasive argument for a lot of would-be writers and there’s evidence that this approach does, indeed, earn its better practitioners money. I had to make a comment, of course.

So; back to the theme of this post. Priorities. Do you know what yours are? Are you driven by money? James Boswell, in his Life of Samuel Johnson, wrote, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. However, Samuel Johnson himself wrote, ‘The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it’.

My own primary aim is to increase my number of readers. It’s been suggested that the easiest way to do so is to charge nothing for the books. I do have a short story offered free; But, Baby, It’s Cold Outside is a bit of seasonal cheer to make readers smile. But it’s been proved, many times, that in general terms, people place little value on something that has no worth placed on it by the producer. So, I compromise and price my books at what seems a fair cost for the piece on offer. Before I place a piece to market, I spend as much time as is needed to make it the very best I can. My priority has been quality at the expense of quantity.

Perhaps I’ve been too concerned with this aspect, since it’s clear that many readers are not really concerned with the quality of the writing. I’m not sure, to be honest. But, in the interests of discovering whether my writing can stand the rigours of quantity and remain both accessible and readable, I’ve decided to devote this year to more in the way of quantity.

So far, I have 7 books available, published over a period of 5 years. This year I aim to produce a further 4 titles. Nothing like the quantity that many of the genre/formula-fitting writers produce, of course. But a challenge, if quality is to be maintained.

So, my priority for this year is to write, and publish, 4 new titles. This means that certain other activities will necessarily have to be curtailed. Much less time with Twitter, Facebook and the other social networks to which I contribute. But not a complete cessation, of course. I will still need to let people know about my writing, after all.

Last week, when I wrote the first part of this post, I had little idea where I would end up. I’ve now set my aims. Do you have targets, aims, priorities in your writing life? If so, please share them with us here.

Oh, and I will try to maintain a post each week here on the blog, of course.

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What Will 2014 Bring?

Last year, around this time, I produced a blog post on my writing activity during 2012. Because I find it useful to detail my activities, and it may interest those who follow the blog, I’m repeating that exercise today for 2013.

It’s been a peculiar year in many ways. Socially and professionally there have been many events and changes. I retired from employment in April and celebrated my 65^th birthday in May. In September, my wife and I celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary and, in the same month, our daughter reached the milestone age of 21. In December, my aunt reached the great age of 100. So many reasons to celebrate, and the freedom to do so in terms of travel and time.

I changed from PC to desktop iMac, an investment I’ve really appreciated in spite of a few disappointments (Apple’s definition of ‘intuitive’ is clearly not the same as mine!). But, in many ways this has been a positive change. I’m still learning, though. And, possibly the single most irritating aspect is the lack of a # on the keyboard, an exclusion that makes hash-tagging Twitter and Facebook posts far less simple than it otherwise would be: Apple take note!

I spent a good deal of time editing the first 2 volumes of my fantasy trilogy, since Fantastic BooksPublishing have accepted the work and will be publishing volume one, A Seared Sky – Joinings, soon. I also spent a lot of hours writing book 3 of the series. This year will see the editing of that volume, of course.

I wrote a few short stories and entered a couple of contests, though fewer than I intended. I made a start at writing poetry, and this is an activity I intend to increase over the coming years: it’s a different skill from prose writing and has a beneficial effect on that, developing the understanding of metaphor and simile as well as encouraging brevity.

On the admin side, I’ve continued with research and compilation of details of writing contests and you can find this regularly up-dated information under the Writing Contests tab above. Hope it’s useful.

Much of December I spent in experimentation on social networking. (The chart illustrates the portion of time spent on this) Really, I did this to confirm suspicions I acquired last year about the effectiveness of such activity for an author. It seemed to me that the apparently ubiquitous ‘author platform’ may be less than effective in actually garnering readers and selling books. This year’s activity has confirmed those suspicions and I shall be curbing my social networking activity this year to concentrate on writing, submitting and publishing stories, since it’s apparent that those writers who achieve wide readerships are the ones who publish more work. As I enjoy the actual writing more than any other of the activities that surround authorship, it will be a pleasure for me to take this turn.

I’m also intending to read more. I read 53 books in 2013 (most of them I reviewed as well) and I’ve set myself a target of 52 books over the year, using the Goodreads Reading Challenge as incentive for this.

I do, however, expect to exceed this target.

The chart at the top of this post shows the proportion of time I’ve spent on the various activities during the year. It’s noticeable that the activity on which I’ve spent most time is networking. Whilst there’s some satisfaction and much pleasure to be gained from interacting (not to mention the way it can help others), I have my doubts about its real value in relation to the activities of an author. The coming year will see a great deal more actual writing, editing, submission and publishing. I’m a writer, and writers write, after all.

So, to the comparison figures, where I list ‘achievements’ for the year. I gave a list for 2012, which I’ve repeated here, so we can see the comparison with 2013. Please note, it’s the left hand column that shows this year’s activities.

2013                                                                            2012

Published work:

None!                                                                          Sensuous Touches, an erotic anthology.

Heir to Death’s Folly, a gothic horror short story.

Rebirth, my contribution to the sci-fi anthology, Fusion,  published by Fantastic Books Publishing.

Writing Contests:

2 entered. No success                                                 4 entered, 1 short-listed.

Social Networking as at the end of each year:

2013                                                                            2012

Blog:

1181 posts                                                                  1062 posts

491 followers                                                              447 followers

181,769 page views                                                    85,511 page views

29,250 visitors identifying location                           18,882 visitors identifying location

Facebook:

Author Page: 569 ‘Likes’                                            379 ‘Likes’

Personal Profile: 1,795 Friends                                  1,599 Friends

Goodreads:

1,001 books listed as ‘Read’                                       882 books listed as ‘Read’

177 Reviews written                                                   130 Reviews written

125 titles in ‘to read’ list                                             136 titles in ‘to read’ list

3,231 Friends                                                              2,118 Friends

LinkedIn:

2,958 Contacts                                                           2,274 Contacts

Pinterest:

1,123 Followers                                                          662 Followers

7,305 Pins on 33 boards                                            4,774 on 32 boards

Google+:

559 in my circles                                                         336 in my circles

413 circles including me                                              183 circles including me

Twitter:

8,759 Following me                                                    5,110 Following me

8,758 I Follow                                                            5,012 I Follow

22,033 Tweets                                                            11,823 Tweets

As you can see, my social networks have all expanded quite significantly. However, this increase has had little impact on the number of books I’ve sold, which is you can expect less social activity this year and more in the way of writing. I’ll continue to record that here on the blog.

By all means add me on your social networks: I’m cutting down on the activity, not stopping it completely! Let’s see what 2014 has to offer, shall we?

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Twitter Tips for Author Tweeters.

I’ve been using Twitter, as a writer, for a few years now. Recently, I’ve been conducting some experiments and doing a spot of exploration. I thought I’d share my findings, for what they’re worth, with the writing community.

I don’t have a huge following: 8,537 followers, as I compose this post, with me following 8,534 and having made 21,299 tweets. But it’s a lot more than I started with at the beginning of the year: 5,110 followers, following 5,012, and 11,823 tweets. Much of that increase has taken place in the past couple of months, with the bulk of it occurring over the month of December. This is the result of the experiments.

I belong to a group on Facebook, called ASMSG (Authors Social MediaSupport Group), just one of a number of such groups. The basic premise is that we re-tweet and post each other’s links in the hope of increasing our exposure. The group has around 780 members at present and we’re all linked with each other. There’s a good deal of activity on Facebook as well as on Twitter.

One of the things I’ve started to do is increase my re-tweeting of other members’ tweets, and that has had an impact, increasing my following. However, I believe the major contributor to the increase has been my collection of twitter handles that I then tweet; promoting these re-tweeters in groups to my followers. By advertising the fact that a tweeter retweets regularly, you encourage others to follow that tweeter. So, what’s in it for me? Well, naturally, other tweeters see what I’m doing and want to get in on the act. They follow me, retweet my tweets and I then add them to my collection. I use a Word document along with the ‘find’ function to keep track of this activity. Since it takes me about an hour each day to do this, I won’t be able to continue it for long. But the experiment has been very instructive.

It’s clear that re-tweeting the tweets of others is an excellent way of spreading not only their messages but also my own name.

So: Tip 1:

If someone retweets something you’ve done, something that matters to you, have the good manners to follow them (if you don’t already) and to RT one of their tweets. You’ll build goodwill along with new followers. And thank them for the RT: your own tweet handle along with theirs will go out to the community and be seen again.

Secondly, I’ve taken to following all those who follow me, regardless of whether I’m fascinated by their activity. This may seem odd thing, but it’s connected me with others in whose tweets and activities I am interested. And it’s resulted in sales of my books. The spread is viral, you see. You’ll notice that my numbers of ‘followers’ and ‘following’ are quite close. This synchronicity seems to encourage people to follow: they see that they won’t be following without being followed back and that’s important to many tweeters.

Tip 2:

Follow back those who follow you.

Are you aware that a tweet that starts with a handle; @stuartaken, for example, will go only to your followers and those who follow the named person, and not to the whole community. By starting a tweet this way, you’re effectively reducing your reach. We’re writers: exposure is vital; the more people who see your name/message, the better. So, you need to start your tweets with something other than the @ symbol. Anything will do. You’re a writer: I’m sure you can come up with alternative wording to overcome this limitation.

Tip 3:

Never start a tweet with @ unless you specifically want it to be limited in its reach.

Many tweeters use automated direct messages. These are generally ignored by the bulk of tweeters. In fact, it’s not unusual for people to unfollow such tweeters, treating the DM as spam. So beware. If you must send a DM, and I’d advise against unless circumstances dictate it, make sure it’s personal, not general.

Tip 4:

Avoid automatic DMs.

Programs, such as justunfollow, allow you to keep track of your followers. There are companies and individuals out there who will follow you until you follow back and then they’ll unfollow you, safe in the knowledge that most people won’t notice this sneaky way of increasing their followers. Using something like justunfollow allows you to keep an eye on those who’ve ceased to follow you and this, in turn, helps keep your followers and those you’re following in some sort of balance. Try it. It’s free, and fairly quick and easy to use.

Tip 5:

Use a program to keep your followers in balance with those you’re following.

Hashtags, #, identify areas of mutual interest for tweeters. On your Twitter page you’ll see a heading,  #Discover. I bet most of you have never ventured into this land, however. Hashtags can be attached to any number of subjects. There’s one for Doncaster, one for Kindle, for Mandela, for SciFi, Fantasy, Horror, and, of course, WRITING. In fact, you name it and there’s probably a hashtag for it. So, what does this mean? It allows you to join a community with the same interests as you, it allows you to interact with them and encourages those who retweet to retweet your tweets to like-minded folk, thereby spreading your name and messages to those most likely to be interested in the topic.

Tip 6:

Use hashtags (the search facility will enable you to identify the exact format you need to use for each specific tag).

One last thing that I suspect a lot of you don’t know (it’s amazing how reluctant users can be to explore websites) is that the headings on the ‘Home’ page have functions. If you click on the tab that says ‘Followers’ you’ll see it lists your followers in date order, with the most recent at the top of that list. You can quickly follow back all new followers from this one spot. Easy.

Tip 7:

Explore and use the various tools Twitter supplies for use. They make life easier and save time.

Some general advice, based on my own experience:

If you’re using Twitter as writer, you want the maximum audience; don’t make your tweets private or use programs like Truetwit to verify twitters. Whilst such barriers may be useful for private users, they get in the way of easy interaction with potentially useful contacts for those of us trying to spread the word. Keep an eye on spammers: the more followers you have, the more likely you are to be targeted by spammers. (I get about 1 or 2 per week). They attach a URL to your handle and you’ll discover you’re being associated with some unsavoury or money-grabbing organisation against your intentions. It’s not a real problem. Just click on the handle of the spammer and then use the drop-down menu to block them. The tweet will die immediately and the spammer will be brought to the notice of Twitter, who will stop them in their tracks, more or less at once.

A few final words of advice, if you can bear them: beware; Twitter can be addictive. Use it sparingly but effectively. And, if you like the idea of being able to schedule tweets for future dates, try out such programs as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. And make sure your social networks and blog/website are all linked: it’ll save you a great deal of time in the long run.

Oh, and by all means, please feel free to follow me at @stuartaken. I’ll follow you back as soon as I can, I promise!