I had to play nurse to my husband for a month.
After he had minor surgery, we had weeks of sleepless nights because we couldn’t find a pain killer which actually dulled his pain. I missed many yoga and Zumba sessions while our apartment just didn’t get cleaned. I was too tired to read and couldn’t venture out to the library to write (as I usually do twice a week).
It also meant I was hardly on social media. To be honest, I hardly am on social media but was on it less during this period.
So, while I was nurse, my Facebook algorithm forgot what I liked.
Most of my friends’ posts were nowhere to be seen while instead, I was bombarded with real estate ads and FB group suggestions. And, of course, those memories that they compel you to share.
It’s true to say that social media works best when you spend too much time on it, and that’s never been me except in those Covid years.
Eventually my feed came back to normal when my husband’s pain subsided, which also meant I remembered how little of it interested me.
I loved the early years where you could talk politics respectfully.
Now if I share anything political hardly anyone sees it. But if I pop up a rare selfie, everyone sees it. Which generally means my algorithm is teaching me how to behave if I want to be seen, rather than me teaching the algorithm to act more human. This means everyone is posting similar content each day.
When I regularly pop on my laptop in the morning, my socials aren’t the first thing I go to. I often have to respond to emails, then I browse the newspaper, then I may do something creative before I check my notifications and certain Facebook groups.
In the past, Twitter was my most successful author platform.
Before recent changes, I took over a popular writing prompt hashtag which ran for several years. It meant I’d need to check people’s responses a few times a day.
Then most people left Twitter. They even warned me beforehand in private messages that they were leaving. And like them, I also created new profiles on Mastodon and Blue Sky but rarely ever look at these.
What I liked about old Twitter was how it appealed to writers, giving us the perfect place to network. It used to be the platform where most people would discover my blog posts. Now, not so much.
In recent months I’ve lost about five hundred followers as the mass exodus continues.
I have become more active on some private FB author groups.
These have helped me get noticed, to an extent. Yet I wonder if social media is worth all that time many authors put into it.
Away from my laptop, my writing life has consisted of:
- a regular writers group,
- meeting up with two author friends and sharing promotional tips,
- reworking an outline on an excel spreadsheet after getting a manuscript professionally assessed,
- paying for a major promotion for one of my novels which ended up being successful,
- adding my books to lists used by library buyers,
- updating my submission skills through an online course.
Everything mentioned above has happened in the past year. And it happened because I watched fellow indie authors post regularly on their socials the way I used to, with little success. So for me it was a case of ‘been there, done that’, now it’s time for a change.
That’s why I’m doing less with social media.
I’ve been published for over ten years now and thought I’d be further ahead in this hobby/career by now, and I know many indie author friends feel the same. Recently, I turned down the opportunity to sell my books at two small conventions as they would have cost me more to be part of than I would make from sales. In the past I would have paid the expenses just to feel more like an author.
I guess when we begin our writing journey, we all get busy telling the world we are authors on our socials. We play the part, posting bookish things, promoting ourselves, and showing that we have a #writinglife.
But when we’re not selling many books, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing. That’s what I’ve done in recent years.
Now it’s a new waiting game to see if any of it pays off.
UPDATE: My BlueSky and Mastodon are becoming active but not to the level of my old Twitter days. It has made a real dent to my sales and my public appearances. I’m back at the drawing board, researching new strategies.
kevin klehr 