Out of Date Social Media Advice You Definitely Should Not Take
They would add a person, then IMMEDIATELY send them a link to buy their book/like their books' page/etc. You know, like a vampire.
When I was a newbie author, the advice I always got was "you need a large social media following for publishers to like you."
And as a newbie author, I very much wanted publishers to like me. However at the time in 2012, I also had maybe twenty followers on average across three platforms. With that slim of a following, I heard, even if my novel was amazing, publishers still wouldn't care.
So, following this sage advice from authors who had clearly been in the industry at least ten minutes longer than me, I bopped around convention to convention, making "friends" and influencing people to have opinions about me. I feel like the latter was much more successful than the former, but most folks were kind about it.
However, as the years passed and my following grew, so did the number of newbie authors like me who had been told that the size of their social media mattered. But there was something new they were doing, something I'd done once and had gotten told off for by a more experienced author (who was nice about it but still). They would add a person, then IMMEDIATELY send them a link to buy their book/like their books' page/etc.
The whole concept of "you must have social media" had turned them into "social media is only for selling books" vampires, sired by the very type of authors who had given me the same advice. But these were new breed of buy-my-book-pires. Nothing could stop them, no holy words would dissuade them or cause them to flee. They just kept spamming their book even when I gave them the response I had once received from that experienced author: stop that, it's irritating.
It got so bad that that anytime a new connection did that, it was an immediate unfriend. I didn't want to give the buy-my-book-pires access to my network via the trust I'd built with my curated circles. That's how they get you, you see. Open your door and the next thing you know, they're knocking on every door in the a-post-ment complex.
So my advice? Write your book, do social media like you do, but don't go around pestering folks to like your book's page, buy your book, or whatever. Don't base your success on what worked for one or two exceptions. Instead do what works for the majority: write a good book.
But then I deleted my accounts a couple years ago and am still very smug about it.
xposted from my Terrible-Writing-Advice repo on GitHub.
