It’s a season of change, in many ways.
Two weeks ago, I lost my job, which began an immediate search for what comes next. Obviously, part of the answer is “writing” and “Brain Jar Press”, both of which got short shrift while I was dallying with full-time employment (for the first time) over the last twelve months. Neither writing nor publishing is enough to sustain us on its own, but it’s looking like I can assemble a Frankenstein’s Monster of a solution from various part-time and contract gigs that have come my way over the last few weeks.
More recently, Elon Musk took over Twitter, which seems to have triggered a mass exodus of users and much thinking about what comes next. For all Twitter has been a pretty terrible place for the last few years, far less fun than it was in its heyday, it held traction as the one place where conversation spread in a way other social platforms of its era now refuse to do. It gave you access to a larger, discursive space where folks talked about their interests in your vicinity. I’m not saddened to see Twitter go by the wayside, but I see it as a potential problem point for those of us who relied upon it for outreach. Specifically, this line of thought explored by Michael Damian Thomas about the impact this will have on speculative fiction magazines.
I’ve been doing the occasional consult and course on writing, publishing, and backlist over the last twelve months, and a big part of what I end up talking about is this fundamental problem. Marketing involves putting your work in front of people who don’t know you but may be interested (lead generation), then nurturing that interest until they’re ready to put money towards your project. New writers often build very detailed plans for nurturing, but give lead generation short shrift, relying on one or two tactics rather than a wide spread of ways in (hell, even experienced writers do this, as lead generation takes time and we often have very little of it).
Twitter, like Livejournal before it, worked well for this because starting a conversation actually served as lead generation. The more people who became involved, the more people who stuck around what else you had to say, and soon you were nurturing a new audience members. But the curse of lead generation is this: anything that works well, when you start out, soon works less effectively and costs more to achieve the same reach.
Once upon a time, blogging was the great lead generation system of their era, and I surely discovered a lot of great authors through the discourse that emerged as authors I already loved responded to, recommended, and linked to other writers in their field. But that medium died, by and large, when RSS fell by the wayside and social services (*cough* Facebook *cough*) made it difficult to put links to posts in front of readers and pull them off the Facebook site.
Once upon a time, putting free ebooks into various stores as a loss-leader was also a great way of generating interest, but as organic reach on certain sights (*cough* Amazon *cough*) gave way to pay-for-play placement and advertising, it’s become less effective than it was.
Five or six years ago, before the Trumpocalypse, Facebook Ads could generate leads cheaply through specific targeting of readers. Two years ago, when it was shiny and new and trying to reach a critical mass of users, TikTok offered great, free reach to writers.
Now, Facebook advertising is a more competitive, expensive field and TikTok reach (and particularly viral reach) grows harder and harder to achieve.
It doesn’t make any of these tools ineffective, just less effective than they once were and a potential threat to any writer or publisher who invested deeply in this one approach for generating leads and talking to audiences.
I’m thinking about this a lot today, courtesy of this time of transition. Making the Freelance/Writing/Publishing hustle work relies heavily on generating leads, and one of the tools that’s served me well is less useful than it has been.
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