For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books.
This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things.
As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on the book of face.
One of the intriguing exercises, leading up to this, has involved sitting down and figuring out a plan for the kinds of content I want the page to focus on. My first version ran something like this:
- Great science fiction and fantasy books/stories.
- Insight into my writing and publishing process.
- Book recommendations and interesting links for fans of SF and Fantasy, plus content about other genres that might be relevant to Speculative Fiction fans (My heart belongs to Spec Fic, but I’m a non-denominational genre fan and author).
- Personal updates about writing-related interests such as gaming, movies, television shows, and pro-wrestling. Also, the occasional photograph of my cat when she’d being adorable.
- Links and writing/publishing advice.
Much as my heart may belong to blogging, in the grand scheme of things, there’s no escaping that Facebook is where a lot of people congregate. Ergo, it gets a short trial period while I see how it fits into my daily schedule, and whether it’s something I can maintain over the long term.
If you’re interested in checking out what I’m doing, you can find the page hither and yon.
