Lessons from Loki on authors using social media

Authors are often told that we should engage in social media. I do, using Twitter and Facebook (as well as this blog), and it certainly does get me some exposure, but I discovered this weekend what it is to have a tweet really take off.

The thing that got me pondering how authors should use social media is my tweet shown on the right. With around 1,200 retweets it is in a totally different league to anything I've put on social media before.

I shared the same image with the same words on my Facebook page - it has been liked 26 times and shared once.

I admit this is a very small sample to draw conclusions from, but it does suggest to me that Twitter is the more valuable mechanism for gaining a wider reach out into the world. Of course you have to be lucky with your content - most of my tweets are retweeted between zero and four times - but Facebook users seem far less likely to pass things on and spread the word.

Of course, this hasn't done a lot to get people excited about my books. But that's not really what engaging with people on social media is about. By all means throw in some of your writing-related material - around the same time I tweeted about a misunderstanding over Amazon rankings and about my 'How to write a popular science book' event at the Guardian - and there's no harm mentioning your books as long as you don't turn into one of these people who tweets about their output every few hours, yelling at people to BUY THEM. But your best bet to build up a following you can then interact with on Twitter (and always remember it is a two-way street) is by putting out fairly regular, quirky, potentially entertaining treats.

Of course, one success doesn't make you a Twitter star. A day later, I put out this tweet, which I thought had a certain something:

All it has achieved is 295 views and no retweets (so far).

The final irony about the tube tweet is one of the effects giving it an extra boost was having it picked up by The Metro, the free London newspaper, which featured my tweet in a little article. As a professional writer, part of me feels inclined to moan that my material is being reused free of charge and without permission - but they did give me appropriate credit, and in reality I am rather pleased.

So, simply put, my lessons from Loki are:

When you see something strange or funny, tweet about it
If someone comments on your tweet reply (or like it if that's more appropriate) - Twitter is about a conversation, not just broadcasting your words of wisdom
There's a huge amount of luck - you can't predict the timing, wording, image that will have this effect
By all means tweet about your books as well, but don't let it dominate

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog