This week, one of my former instructors from the Wilkes University Writing Program, Christine Gelineau, emailed me prior to the next residency for current students. (Alumni are always welcome on the community email forum--a neat feature of the program).
Christine, an accomplished poet, and playwright
Jean Klein teach the "Business of Writing" module, a series of upper-level craft classes that I found invaluable.
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| my opera blog |
Christine asked if she could include a mention of my
opera blog and networking successes at establishing my credentials and building an audience for my manuscripts even before they've found a publisher. She also was also interested in sharing any comments about the value/drawbacks of Twitter to student writers and the vast would-be published.
If Christine thought it might have value to graduate students in Wilkes creative writing program, perhaps it may have value on Scrivengale, too. Hence, this post.
Building an audience for a book
Here's a little history on my attempts to integrate social media with creative writing. While I was finishing my novel with opera as a backdrop (Spring Semester of 2010), in February of 2010, I established a blog called "Operatoonity: Everything you never knew you wanted to know about writing," which logged 12,000+ visitors since then. At the same time I set up two Twitter accounts, one as me (Gale_Martin) and one as my Operatoonity persona. There are lots of Twitter tools to help you quickly target people by interest, and I began following nearly everyone I found with an interest in opera: performers, houses, fans, conductors, and composers, thereby giving me a ready pool of people to interview for the blog. Through Twitter I also learned about opera from the content links others posted and about specialized contests such as Washington National Opera's songwriting contest, which I ended up winning first place (and an embarrassing number of cool prizes.)
Writers on Twitter
This October, as I began other manuscripts with themes other than opera, I realized I needed a writing/publishing blog, a stepping stone to an author's website, so that's when I established Scrivengale. I believe it was agent Janet Reid who said if fiction writers don't have a website they needed to at least have a blog or she'd be hard-pressed to consider their work.
Blogger has made so many improvements in their platform that a Blogger blog is a good stand in for a website because of all the pages you can add. Just by visiting other writing bloggers' sites, you can get a great overview of how these pages can be used to flesh out and plump up your blog. If you don't believe me, take a look at this writing blog,
"Unedited," hosted by Jennifer Daiker, which has all the robustness of a website because of the extra pages she's created in addition to the home page.
If you have a writing blog, and you're not on Twitter, or not sending your content to Twitter, you are missing an invaluable opportunity to take advantage of built-in syndication features. The technology is there to Tweet your posts--even on Wordpress--and you are silly not to avail yourself of it. A quick review of my Scrivengale stats proves Twitter is the highest ranking single URL sending traffic to this blog and one of the top referring sites.
If you blogged back in the day (circa 2006-2008) as I did--sans Twitter and before the Facebook revolution--when you posted and prayed to the Google Gods that people would somehow find your blog, then you know how invaluable the social media are to bloggers developing followings and readers today.
As I told Christine, there are
hundreds of agents, editors and publishers on Twitter that you can follow. If you are an unpublished, unagented author, you're lucky--very lucky--if they follow you back. However, I had an editor for a major publishing house follow me back because I asked her a thoughtful question after one of her Twitter posts.
Even if the glitterati from the publishing world aren't following you, you can always ask them questions by posting a mention to their attention, by using their Twitter user name preceded by @. If they check their mentions and deign to respond, you're in luck.
Regardless of whether they follow you or not, lots of agents and editors post links to their blog content--filled with pearly advice for would-be authors. And they dole out lots of industry tips, 140 characters at a time, too. Sometimes they make spur-of-the-moment offers to answer questions on a certain topic, read partials, and even whole manuscripts if you are willing to make a video, for instance. Even then, they may not always follow through on Twitter "promises" made. So be wary of that aspect of Twitter, too, that it encourages more impulsivity than regular email would because it has its own psychic energy or momentum. That energy is one of the great things about Twitter. Just don't fall prey to the impulsivity it allows.
Be professional
I read a
hilarious essay about shopping for e-books while drinking heavily. While such a bald-faced confession seemed to buoy this memoirist's image, writers need to be careful when putting content out there, and not to say things you later regret, that tear down the personal brand you've been trying to build, one Tweet at a time. Once you launch your sentiments into cyberspace, they're gone--irretrievable--but perfectly able to come back to haunt you at the most inopportune times because Twitter content never dies.
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I can sack my reputation with
one irresponsible Tweet?
Inconceivable! |
Right now, there's a lot of information circulating on Twitter about writers acting unprofessionally, and that if they say anything to run down an agent or an editor, they are a tight network growing tighter all the time, and their gaffe will eventually come back to haunt them.
Yes, social media is making the world smaller, one byte at a time. You could conceivably sack your chances to be published with one foul Tweet flown in front of hundreds of publishing professionals. But the increased connectivity can work to a writer's advantage if you're smart and strive to be professional.
Unless of course, bad behavior is part of your writerly persona (like @BadBanana) or you're channeling an investigative reporter or something. Then by all means, skewer away.
