Picking Places to Exist: Writing, Publishing, & Social Media

Over the past few months Brain Jar Press has released a series of chapbooks and short story collections at a pretty decent clip. Both Kathleen Jennings Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion and Angela Slatter’s Red New Day and Other MicroFictions have sold in surprising numbers (and, in Kathleen’s case, really surprising numbers). We’ve brought Angela’s Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales out in paperback and ebook for the first time, and I released the second issue of the Kaleidoscope’s Children series, Unauthorized Live Recording.

Meanwhile, things chug along behind the scenes. I’m gearing up to announce a big project that will run through 2021, incorporating work from a half-dozen different writers. There are individual releases all the way through the year, including a nice mix of reprint projects and original works.

Which means this week is all about contracts, doing a short course on micro-business management, and figuring out the current thorny problem du jour: where do I want to exist, online, as a publisher and a writer?

One of the side-effects of setting up Brain Jar as it’s own brand, rather than making it an offshoot of my writerly presence, is the way it doubles the workload of being online and engaging with people. There are two Facebook pages, two Twitter feeds, two Instagram feeds, and two newsletters that need to be maintained. There are also a handful of professional groups I maintain a presence in, and some old webforums I like to post to (because I am older than dirt, and still miss the early days of the web). There’s also a small litany of ‘should-do’s’, like starting a reader group or building a YouTube presence.

When you’re a one man shop, wearing all the hats, that’s a lot of places competing for time and attention.

At the same time, I don’t feel comforting winnowing down and focusing on either Peter M. Ball or Brain Jar Press alone. Doing heavy promo of my own work through the Brain Jar Press brand seems dicey and problematic, and my personal presence has always leaned deeper into the lets-talk-about-all-the-mucky-details-of-the-work than is appropriate when you’re working with other people’s art.

Part of my goal for this week involves carving out time to do some deep thinking about all of the options, the processes I use to develop content for them, and models I might be able to use that are feasible with the time and technological proficiency I posses.

It’s also a chance to think about why I’m using these tools. I’m wary of the fact that maintaining a social media presence can be highly reactive and habitual, rather than strategic and focused on a particular goal.

I’m a believer that social media can sell books–not necessarily in a directly measurable way, but as a lightning rod for fan interest and conversation.

The danger is that it’s a long-term game played using tools that offer quick dopamine hits for short-term activity. It’s easy to get suckered into doing things because those short bursts of attention and likes can feel good when you’re having a bad week, even when working on social media content isn’t the best use of your time.

Similarly, there are approaches that I’ve used because they were fun at the time, which aren’t necessarily the best choices for the content or current context.

For example, a lot of the stuff I used to blog about has found its way into my Newsletter in recent years, because Notes From the Brain Jar is where folks were reading. But, as Kathleen Jennings keeps pointing out to me at Write Club, it’s much harder to link people to great newsletter content than it is a blog post.

Which becomes one of those things I keep stewing on as I consider all the places to be as a writer and publisher: what are the strengths of the form? The weaknesses? What’s the best way to take advantage of those?

It’s a huge amount of stuff to think about, on both the strategic and the tactical level, and I don’t really have answers yet. I suspect a lot of this week is really about setting the terms of engagement.