Author Platform

Your Audience: Building versus Earning

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People , , ,

2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep debt; I went to motherfucking Vienna and rode the Wiener Riesenrad, which is one of the few tourist attractions anywhere in the world that holds some appeal to me (largely thanks to its prominence in The Third Man and Before Sunrise).

I discovered that riding the Wiener Riesenrad is a fucking terrible idea if you’re afraid of heights.

One of the smartest things I heard last year came via Chuck Wendig, who did an interview at the Get Read online conference where he talked about author platform and maintaining a career as a writer. I meant to post about it back then, when I first heard it, but it was in the immediate aftermath of coming back from the UK and jet lag was kicking my ass.

Fortunately, Chuck revisited it in his most recent post about resolutions:

I WILL EARN MY AUDIENCE

You don’t build an audience like it’s a fucking chair. And you don’t beat your potential audience about the head and neck with that goddamn chair, either. You earn them by being the best version of you. You earn them by being passionate and awesome and not-an-asshole. You don’t earn them by bickering. You don’t earn them through intrusive marketing missives. You don’t earn them through blathering yelly-screamy auto-DMs or through giant Hulk fists made of quivering spam. You earn them by being a person. A person who happens to have many amazing stories to share.

Writing Resolutions: 2014 and Beyond, Chuck Wendig, Terribleminds.com

I just printed it out and tacked it above my writing computer, to serve as a reminder of the theme I’m adoption for 2014.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Writing, Not Blogging

PETERMBALL Smart Advice from Smart People ,

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey.

Let me repeat that. Hooey.

Cat Rambo has a sensible blog post about not blogging up on her website this week, which I’m linking to because: a) it’s good, common-sense advice that syncs into the things I routinely tell people who ask about writing and social media and stuff; and b) it neatly explains why I’ve been absent around these parts, and left everyone hanging half-way through the Die Hard series.

The TL:DR version: I’m being mugged by life at the moment, and most of my brain-meats have been expended getting the GenreCon Program up and running. The head-space I’ve got left over goes on projects in order of deadline, ’cause when you’re working with limited time and mental resources, ya gotta prioritize the things that need to be done and the things that help you recharge.

I am about halfway through my draft of Die Hard, Part Three, though. With luck, I’ll get it finished over the weekend (which is looking gloriously, outrageously free of day-jobbery) and posted next week.

Make Your Content Easy to Share

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,

Today’s post is a short-but-passionate plea to a whole bunch of bloggers out there: install some form of social media sharing on your blog. If you’re not sure what I mean, go to your blog and see if you have something like this at the base of your posts:

What Social Media Links Look Like
These links are purely decorative, for the sake of an example. Real links can be found at the the bottom of this post.

It may not be an exact match for this, but there should be something like it. A way of linking the post you’ve just made, quickly and easily, to places like facebook, twitter, and other forms of social media. If you have it, go upon your way, my friend, for you and I have nothing further to speak of.

If you don’t have it, keep reading.

Personally, I don’t care what form of link salad you use. My particular preference runs towards Share This ’cause it’s what I know, but most platforms will have a bevvy of options and WordPress, at least, offers the function to anyone whose installed Jetpack (and, if you’re using wordpress, odds are you have). Hit Google for ten minutes and you’ll probably find some options that are workable with your Content Management System of choice.

So here’s what I want you to do. Pick one. Install it. Hit Google again to figure out how, if you aren’t particularly technologically savvy, or ask one a friend who speaks fluent blogger. Hell, if you’re really desperate, give me a link to your site in the comments and I’ll try and find a decent how-to for you. Just make the attempt and get something there.

The internet is rapidly evolving. The age when people actually visited websites to engage with content is over, and even the period where we pushed content out towards the reader is pretty much done. RSS is dying. Google Reader is officially dead. We find new content via social media, and you want to make sharing your shit as easy as goddamn possible in order to facilitate that.

I can think of at least three websites I’d share the content from twice as often if only they implemented some form of social media linking. They’re consistently interesting, but my day-job involves curating up to a hundred social media links per week. The seconds I can save by clicking a twitter or facebook icon at the bottom of the post do actually matter in this instance. 

That  link-salad down the bottom of a post isn’t just there for decoration. Ignoring it when trying to build an online presence is kinda like telling yourself you can be a carpenter without learning to use a hammer.