Detoxing my writing from Social Media
By
John William Tuohy
“It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal
popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all
men.” Auden on Writing, Originality,
Self-Criticism, and How to Be a Good Reader
Well, the title isn’t
totally true. I have minimalized social media in my life, and in a way, it is a
like a detox (I have never actually detoxed from anything, so that’s a shot in
the dark) But, to be clear, I haven’t quit social media.
So while I detox from
overusing…that’s really the key word here….overuse… social media, I am not
about to toss the baby out with the bath water. I have simply placed limits on
my use of social media. My plan now is, that with no notifications to check, no
photos to look at, and no gifs to retweet, to spend my time learning my craft,
the writing craft, become much more productive in my writings and creating
better books as a result.
Will I ever get off of
social media completely? No, of course not. Things are changing. For the past
decade, one of the first things I would in the morning after coffee was to
check Facebook and the weather app. Now I walk the dogs around the yard instead
and take a guess at what the weather will be that day. But still, I do miss my
Facebook pages and my blogs.
Despite the growing
negative clamor surrounding social media by the thinking crowd, social media
does serve a purpose and it isn’t evil. In fact, its as far from evil as one
can get. The only real danger of social media, something that could actually
harm you, is that it’s easy to live in a virtual life on social media, rather
than making real life off of social media. I’ll give you an example. If I quit
Facebook permanently, I question how many of the 450 people that Facebook calls
my friends, would remain in contact with me. Very few, I suspect because most
of them are empty connections.
By the way, I had a lot
more than 450 friends once. Then the Presidential election 2016 happened and it
all hit the fan, the ugliness of political intolerance. Some people dropped me
from their friends' list when I made my political leanings known. And I dropped
others because their political proselytizing was endless. Eventually, in the
name of peace and sanity, I stopped posting anything political then I simply
dropped people who wouldn’t stop posting things political.
Another negative is that
Facebook put me back in touch with people I had long ago moved away from. Once
I was back in touch with them I came to realize there was actually a pretty
good reason I moved them out of my life. I changed, they changed, and some
didn’t change at all, all of which wasn’t necessarily good.
I also met up with some
people some fairly appalling human being that, had I met them in person, I
would have avoided but that’s the wonderful thing, and the awful thing, about
being on social media is one can edit themselves into perfection. We can edit
their interactions, edit their cleverness edit our humor. Social media allows
us to present to the world the person we love the world to see. That isn’t
inherently bad as much as it is human nature.
As a side note, I stopped
Yelping as well. My wife and I are amateur, but dedicated chefs, and we’re darn
good cooks, so we mostly eat at home or a few tried and trusted better restaurants
we like. Occasionally, usually, when we’re on the road we’ll dine out a better
restaurant.
We happily pay the higher
prices, but we expect the quality of the food and service to match those
prices, when they didn’t, I would write a stinging review without qualms. Many
times the restaurant owner or the restaurant staff would scribble a sentence or
two in their defense of poor service and overpriced unprepared meals and the
back and forth would begin, almost always ending with the restaurant people calling
me a nasty name or worse. After one of those incidents, I asked myself “What
the hell are you doing?” and I signed off of Yelp forever and have never missed
it.
Anyway, I doubt, very
much, the claims that social media is destroying the fabric
of society. In fact, it’s a ridiculous claim made by people who have no concept
of the complexity of societies fabric. The fact is that social media has done
far more good than bad in American life.
Yes, social media often
distorts things, but so does television and film, literature, lawyers and
college professors with a bias. True, social media can be a mindless distraction
and it can, in fact, it often does bring out the pettiness in people, largely
because it allows the cowards of the world to strike out or voice a nasty
opinion without using their names.
Remember there is a good
deal of enjoyment to be had with Facebook and Blogger and I’ll probably always
participate on some level, just not with the same intensity, before my
withdrawal. I still spend hours, dozens and dozens of hours, doing research
online and I don’t think that will ever change, in fact, if I had to choose one
thing to thing to read on a desert Island it would be Newspapers.Com, the best
$25 a month any writer can spend on anything.
It isn’t just Facebook
and Yelp I’m cutting back on. I’ve canceled ten blogs that I ran that covered
various subjects. I had three email accounts and dropped two of them along with
the dozens and dozens of Google alerts I had assigned to them. I have one
Hotmail account now and I’ve vowed to check no more than twice a day. I have
deleted most of the apps I use, but not all of them.
To be clear, I was never
active very many social media sites. I am too damn old to be bothered with
Snapchat, Twitter confuses me, whatever else Twitter might do, it doesn’t sell
books and I have no use to be on LinkedIn. I don’t Instagram, mostly because I
don’t know how, nor do I understand what it could do for me as a writer. And
that’s what started all of this social media silliness I now have to detox
myself from.
As of about ten years
ago, I started a second career as a full-time writer. I write primarily
non-fiction, stage plays, and some fiction. I’ve had a bit of success in each
genre. My novels and short stories sell…okay, their not leaping off of Amazon’s
shelves but their not comatose either.
I am primarily a
non-fiction writer. When the “publish yourself” wave came along, I was a
willing surfer. I write about true crime, organized crime and pop history.
Fiction sell wells, but better than fiction and in total, on a good month, I
make about five or six hundred a month from books sales.
Still, I want my books to
sell and when, just over a decade ago, digital marketing became the shiny new
promise for authors, I leaped on that bandwagon. I sat down and charted out an
invasion on social media to bring readers to my books.
Self-promotion is a necessary evil for writers and since Blogs and Facebook are free and can reach
an international audience, I decided to build a marketing network of blogs and
Facebook pages to promote my works.
Here’s some solid advice
for new writers. Learn the in’s and outs of book publicity, especially if you
plan to stay with on the traditional publishing route. One of the very first
questions a publisher will ask is “How do YOU plan to publicize your book?”
Even the large publishing
houses are severely cutting back on PR staff (and editors too) Not that PR
people in most publishing houses were all that good anyway. I published with
standard sized New York houses. One of the publicity people I was assigned to
had been a strip promotor in her last job and the other was a smart ass kid
straight out of college. Neither of them did a very good job and I ended up
doing all my own publicity without them. In fact, I found the entire “working
with a publisher business” to be a galling experience.
But if you are a budding
writer, don’t do as I do. You should try to publish with a house before running
off to publish your own work on Amazon. It will be good for your ego, good for
your resume and good for your pocketbook. I’m old. I have a lifetime filled
with achievements. The two books I published with New York houses are still in
print, my plays have won distinguished awards. I’m me, you be you. I chart my
own course as a writer. I try, desperately, to stay as far away as I can from
the publishing world. I don’t want, nor do I need to be, part of a writing
community. I studiously avoid other writers. I’m not an unfriendly guy, I'm
very much the opposite in fact, but writing is not a team sport. Writing
consists of the writer and the writer alone. And that, my friends, is the
beauty and the misery of the craft.
Back to the issue at
hand. I built a series of Blogs on Blogger, a free site that allows the blogger
a good deal of freedom in designing their blogs and each one comes with a quick
and simple means to repost the blog on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, another
blog and a Hotmail connection.
I also built a series,
about twenty in all, of Facebook pages, which are also free. Each blog and page
was about the various subjects that interest me….Greek philosophy, Roman
history, writing, photography….all it created under the theory that if those
subjects and many others fascinated me, they fascinate others and I was write about
that. The readership for these outlets was in the hundreds of thousands. One of
them “Child of the Sixties Forever” had close to two million reads. Working on
the established fact that content is king, a changed the features on all of
these pages at least once a week, usually more. And to find that content I
scoured Tumbler, another free service that carries wonderful photographs and
articles which can be tailored to your interests. I covered each blog and
Facebook page with covers of my various books added a direct link to Amazon
along with each cover.
But, after years and
years of this, nothing dramatic was happening with my sales. I had a good
strong, healthy following and high visibility on my postings but when I
compared the numbers of people following my various sites to my books sales,
the two didn’t match up, if they did I would be a millionaire from books sales
many times over.
It turns out that social
media isn't ideal for selling books, but it can help, a little. That’s the
point to remember, it only helps a little. Social media is only a moderately
good tool to market our work. However, social media seems to help writers who
are already selling well on a national basis, but otherwise, people don’t
generally go on social media to find new books to buy.
I really did have a sort
of micro-empire going on, but to what end? I had to ask myself “Is this time
well spent?” and the answer kept coming up “No.” But, I’m sorry to say, I
continued on anyway, because of the ease of it all. I have, at my fingertips,
no matter where I am, a computer, an iPad and a cell phone that can put on to
the media within seconds. And so, over time, social media had become my
yearbook, a diary, my photo album, and my personal PR team.
Aside from ease of use, I
think I lost my way, I had confused productively keeping my outlets fresh with
new content over selling books and make an income for myself. The other bit of
confusion that I created for myself was the belief that my writing voice had to
be heard through my random postings and the occasional article I would write,
and the truth was, my voice wasn’t being heard because what I was writing was
painfully brief and not terribly passionate or interesting.
I’ll keep you posted
on how it goes.