How to stop Worrying and Love Social Media

I both love and hate social media. As a user, I adore finding out what people are up to, especially since a lot of my friends from school have moved overseas, as well as my cousins, and it’s great to find out how much snow they’ve had while we’re in summertime, or how they celebrated a big birthday. At first there was the question “but when you catch up with them, don’t you already know the stories?” but I’ve found that it helps enhance the stories because you might have already seen the photographs.

I’m also an armchair traveller, and I love living vicariously through other people’s travels to places I might not be able to get to.

But as an author, I struggle with what to say, and when to say it. My life isn’t that interesting, I think to myself. What have I been doing? Working. Running around after the kids. I write to escape all that. How do I then make social posting on whatever platform that is meaningful to someone and helps them interact with my work?

I am also not a great salesperson. Ask me what my book is about and I falter, despite me having written it and thrown myself deeply into a lore and world I’ve created. I struggle to perform for marketing.

I outlined these issues to family a while back, expounding my frustration with what I could post and why. I didn’t want to be that person who’s posts were sell, sell, sell, and yet I couldn’t see how else to get people to read my stories. But the conversation I had was awesome. It really helped me see the system in a fresh new light.

Social media is there to be engaged with. It wants to keep you there, to interact, to keep scrolling. Books are the same. You write them so people can read them, interact with them, and keep reading. People want to engage with you and with the book. They want to post fan art of your characters, and have the author celebrate them enjoying the work. They want to know where your inspiration comes from, and why you decided your main dragons should be blue.

Some of the most successful authors on social media have an angle to their posts, whether it is cute vignettes about where they last left their character on the page, or maybe they fully invite you to join them in their writing journey. Some are just really, really good at marketing themselves and their works.

Each of them engage with their books and with their readers in interesting ways, and that helps them be successful. They do, as all authors do, end up with some posts which market their work and intend to sell copies of their books. But it isn’t all about that.

Seeing social media in this light has helped me develop my own style, my own choice of what to post and when. Understanding the algorithms of each platform also helps – how many hashtags to use and when, for example – is also helpful.

And not only that, but engaging with the platforms is important. The systems pick up if you’re using the platform just to post and do nothing else, and they do punish you for this. If you comment on others posts, however, even just a thumbs up here and there, and spend a little time each day interacting with other content creators, they love that too – and you’ll find your time on the platforms becomes easier.