When your writing is published, expect to go public. Positive engagement with your audience is critical to the success of your book. Readers want to connect with authors. And writers like to hear feedback from their readers. During the last decade publishers have come to expect authors to create and manage their online personas on various social media platforms to promote and market their books. Few authors relish the time they spend on social media and most are uncomfortable with the loss of privacy. Shortly after novelist Elena Ferrante’s identity was revealed in October by an Italian journalist, author and journalist Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote an essay for The Millions about the end of privacy for writers. She wrote about feeling the need to buffer or filter her public image when selecting a new author headshot. Instead of a photograph, her official avatar is a sketch by artist Kate Gavino. Women are judged because of their looks. Not too old. Not too young. Not too serious, but serious enough. Author headshots matter for men, too, however, the quality of their writing is not assumed to be reflected in their physical appearance. When you go public, you make yourself vulnerable to cyberbullying. When your book is published, you have no control over what others will say in customer reviews on Amazon. If you share a link to your blog or your book on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, you are expected to reply to comments. When you put your book out…
Happy 6th Birthday to Twitter. The social media platform based on messages of 140 characters is growing up and it’s time to take it seriously, authors. As a recovering academic who studied communications history, I’ve spent decades observing how new communication technologies come and go. Remember 8-track tapes? Beta-video? Reel-to-reel and cassette tapes? Anyone remember the TV show “Car 54 Where Are You?”? Twitter is… [Read More]
Filed Under: Anne Lamott, Car 54 Where Are You, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, Salman Rushdie, Twitter
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Yes, it is Tuesday. Yes, I am late in posting this blog. Yes, I owe my sanity to the digital divas I work with at Swenson Book Development, LLC. Like many authors, I just want to write. When things go awry, I want to cry. In the last 10 days, the email server went down, my webhost crashed its system, my company email account popped… [Read More]
When I use technology, I can’t help but think of this driver’s refrain, passed on to me by a former (slightly suspect) driver’s ed instructor: if you aren’t sure where you’re going, it’s best to travel on the road you know. It sounds dull and silly, but sometimes the shortcut gets you lost, takes longer, or causes an unnecessary headache. Take the road well-traveled if… [Read More]
A decade ago I kissed the golden handcuffs of tenure goodbye. I walked away from teaching journalism and media studies at Ithaca College in May 2002. No one bothered to ask me why. The conditions and experiences haven’t gotten much better for female faculty and in some ways worse. In 1980, 49 percent of full-time female faculty had tenure, compared to 70 percent of men…. [Read More]
A quarter million people descended on Austin, TX, to partake in SXSW this weekend. Yesterday I arrived at the Austin Convention Center to pick up my badge and discovered a que that wound around the entire building and back again. Two hours standing in line provided ample time for observing the social behavior of new media folk. Not surprisingly, most people held smartphones in their… [Read More]