Readers and the social media

“If your readers aren’t on Tumblr, there’s no point in wasting your time with it.”

The above wisdom sailed down my Twitter stream the other day. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the good sense to favour it so that I could give you the exact quote or – more importantly – who came up with it. But the message is understood without them:

In order to reach new readers, you have to be present where they are. It won’t happen the other way round.

Back in a day, authors would only be available at a given time and place, i.e. on book tours. Readers would either show up or not, depending on the popularity of the author. Book tours haven’t disappeared anywhere, but they have become a luxury that publishers pay only for selected few. For most self-published authors, they aren’t an option at all.

Thankfully, there’s the social media, where authors can be available at all times for everyone, everywhere. Depending on the popularity of the platform you use, the number of potential readers you could reach can be substantial. Provided it’s the platform your readers use.

My personal favourite platform is Twitter. I like the fast pace, the amount of information I find there, and the ease of communicating with complete strangers. I have a nice following there, to whom I tweet regularly about my books too.

But here’s the rub: my Twitter followers aren’t my readers. Most of my following is fellow self-published authors, most of whom couldn’t give a damn about my books. So, from a marketing point of view, Twitter is the waste of my time.

Good thing I like it for personal reasons.

The same is true with other platforms. Tumblr may be great for what it’s created for, but if your readers don’t use it, investing a lot of time and effort on it, expecting it to generate sales, is pointless. Most opt for Facebook, as statistically readers of any genre or author are likely to be found there. But even Facebook won’t help marketing your books, if you only ever reach other authors there.

The difficult part – obviously – is finding where your readers are. The biggest might not always be the best place for you to be. For example, writers of middle grade books might find their readers on one of those new platforms that are more popular than Facebook among school children – even if it’s their parents that ultimately buy the books. A smaller forum specialised on your topic might work well too.

Your effort should be put on finding the readers, not on spending time on all platforms with the hopes that one of them might work. Only very dedicated readers make the effort of finding the author, and that only after they have already read and liked something by them. Your presence on multiple platforms works brilliantly for that. But to find new readers, you have to go where they are.

That said, I won’t give up Twitter, no matter how much time I spend on it – which is too much. However, I finally caved and opened a Facebook page. I’m not a fan of FB, and I don’t really know how to use it, but it is the platform where my readers are, and therefore I have to be there too. Take a look, and then ask yourself, is this were my readers are? Or should I be elsewhere?

Prologues, yay or nay?

I don’t like prologues. Never have. They are usually boring, overly long ramblings of things the author thinks a reader needs to know to understand the book. At worst, they are a necessary read before one gets to the actual book without any real content; at best they give a short glimpse to a character that then promptly dies, inciting the events that  follow.

Whatever form they take, I have never written one for my books. I have heartily embraced every writing advice that tells to delete them. My books don’t need them.

I was, therefore, rather surprised when I found myself writing a prologue. The book was doing fine without it. It didn’t even occur to me to add it. Yet, the moment the notion of writing it entered my mind, it felt self-evident that the book needed it. So now it has one.

I’m writing a thriller – of sorts. Most of it is in the protagonist’s point of view. It works when I’m trying to keep the reader as much in the dark as the protagonist is, but at times it can be limiting. Sometimes a reader needs to know more than the protagonist does. It adds to the tension.

That’s what my prologue is for. The reader knows to expect something that the protagonist has no clue of. The contents of the chapter are essential, but also the form. It needs to be a prologue, not merely the first chapter, otherwise the reader might be led to believe that the people in it are the protagonists. It’s a fine definition, but I think it’s there.

And so, at least for now, my upcoming book has a prologue. And I don’t mind it all that much. The book took a whole new shape after I added it. That doesn’t mean I will start writing them to all my books from now on. The rule still stands.

Epilogues, on the other hand. Those I like.