How are you using
social media to promote your book? What aspect of social media would you like
to learn more about? What are your next steps?
Once again I’m slightly
off topic with today’s response, but this is something that's been on my mind
for a while – antisocial media.
These days I find I’m
becoming less fond of social media, seeing it more and more as antisocial media. It’s fine if you play
it safe, using it to promote books, providing they don’t have controversial
content or studied or well-researched fact. However, dare to have an opinion,
no matter how politely and clearly stated, and the experts of the social media
descend with great speed from a height of lofty judgement telling you not only what
you should think but how to express this to suit their specific agenda.
On a recent post where
I’d made a considered comment, in the space of a couple of hours I was branded
as wrong, stupid, a wet blanket, having crazy ideas, must be fun at parties
(with heavy sarcasm), dumb, misguided, horribly negative and one-sided. It
seems that in some quarters opinions are the right of a select few unless you
concur with them.
Before the emergence of
Facebook and other social networking sites, bloggers were often the recipient
of this abuse, for that is what it is. These days, blogs are pretty much left
alone and why not, when the keyboard warriors can read the first few words of a
Facebook comment, God forbid they should read it properly and in its entirety, and
unleash their expert opinion about you as a person of non-merit.
So what is the answer?
Is it to avoid writing
or stating opinion or avoid social media altogether?
Or is it a case of that
authenticity is too human for the netherworld of social media and must be replaced
with fauxthenticity?
For me, authenticity is
about transparency, reality, truth and genuineness. In promoting my books and opinion
pieces it's the validity of what I stand for so I suspect that’s where I’ll
stay, copping a verbal gang bashing from time to time, slinking away to lick my
wounds, then following my convictions back to the platform of my belief.
Well said, I am finding the whole social media thing a bit of a drag, that inhibits my desire to write.
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