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Is Social Media Worth The Effort?

December 26, 2012 by 2 Comments
I find promoting my novels through Social Media to be as natural and elegant a process as juggling with my elbows. I’m constantly resolving to do better, to update more often, to work on my wit and display a certain elan that will entice and intrigue strangers to pay my Amazon Author Page a visit. Does it work? Not really, or at least, not that I can tell. Yet I post infrequently to this blog, almost never Tweet, and my Facebook updates rarely garner a response from anybody else other than my good friends. 
Instead, I have this perverse belief that the best marketing I can do is to simply write good books. Rather than spend hours each day on social media (enough with the capitalizing), I’ve spent all my time these past five months writing three and a half novels. Somehow, despite the evidence, I believe that good writing promotes itself. That if I write good books, people will notice, and tell their friends. 
Which is why it was satisfying to read J.K. Konrath’s blog post last night. Konrath was the early adopter of self-publishing, and worked tirelessly to convince other authors to give it a go. His blog became the go-to place for wisdom and advice, and last night he posted the following:

Trust me, it is liberating to be free of the opinions of strangers. We all need to focus on our writing. Because the millions of readers out there don’t care about your blog. They aren’t searching for you on Twitter and avoiding your books based on the comments of others. They aren’t taking one star reviews seriously.

It’s very easy to obsess in this business. But I haven’t seen a single shred of evidence that obsession helps careers.

The thing that I have seen, over and over, is people finding success by writing good books.

I really think it is possible to make a very nice living by writing and not worrying about anything else.

Is there value to social media? I believe so, but I think it lies in the pleasure an author might derive from simply interacting with readers and other writers, and not in promoting their novels. When my novel Throne hit that freak wave of popularity last Christmas and was downloaded 26,000 times in 5 days, it had nothing to do with social media. So what does it mean then that my novels haven’t generated the word of mouth marketing that I had hoped for? That I need to continue writing ever better books.  

Filed Under: blogging, konrath, self publishing, social media, the value of writing good books

Comments

  1. CableMonkey says:
    December 26, 2012 at 10:19 pm

    I think a more book focused social media like Goodreads, Library Thing and Fictfact would be time better spent than Twitter.

    Reply
  2. Philip Tucker says:
    December 26, 2012 at 11:44 pm

    I hadn’t realized that you could actually target those places specifically. My blog already cross posts over to GR, but I’ll have to explore and see what other options are available on those sites… thanks for the tip!

    Reply

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