Flouncing back to Facebook…

This weekend, one of the folks I follow on Twitter suggested that I should go back to Facebook. They’d been using it to make huge progress with their comic and movie review blog and thought I should go back and give it another shot. Well I said I’d think about and slept on it, and I decided, what could it hurt to try again?

MY BRAIN. (Yeah, I’ve done that joke before, but sometimes you gotta go back to what works.)

First of all, I can only use Facebook in IE because logging into it with Firefox causes all kinds of drama with error messages on Facebook, and on every single site I normally frequent. I logged out, rebooted, and used IE to log in, and that cleared up the problem. But for a good hour or so, I was growling “Motherfucker” so often you’d think I was trying out for a death metal band.

I also had trouble setting up a new page for myself, but that was a misunderstanding on my part. And my first few posts, Facebook kept asking for money to promote my updates. Sh’yeah, Facebook. if I had money, I wouldn’t be coming back to your invasive ass.

Anyway, here’s my Facebook page, and here’s my profile. You can choose to like me, add me to your friends list, or do both. I’m going to try adopting a policy to keep the content of the two separate, and that means no self-promotion through my normal profile. I will post writing updates for what I’m working on, but for news on book releases and blog posts, you should like my page and check in occasionally for updates.

My hope with this policy is that by setting my blog posts and book releases as exclusive content for the page, I’m giving people a reason to want to like it and check back every once in while. I still have concerns about whether my stuff will show up in people’s timelines, so checking in is important. I also hope that by keeping these two streams separate, it might encourage fans of my page to hit the share button every once in a while and help me find new readers.

I have no plans to link my Twitter and Facebook profiles, as I would flood out peoples’ timelines with my huge amount of tweets. This way, you can choose how much of my crazy you feel like dealing with. If you only want the basic package, look for me on Facebook. If you want the full stream of consciousness crazy, head over to my Twitter account. I hate the idea of repeating myself across every social network, and I think that ignores the differences in how each platform works. So maybe by keeping my streams separate, I’ll give you more reason to check each out.

This still leaves me wondering what to do with Tumblr, Wattpad, and Goodreads. With Tumblr, I’d intended to use it for floating ideas for new stories, but that kind of fell apart after a few weeks, and now I’m just randomly sharing other peoples’ posts. It’s not that I don’t want to use it for promotion, but I keep forgetting it’s there when I’m releasing new books. Maybe I’ll try something to drum up business there with my next release, Nobody Special. On Wattpad, I still have a collection of stories that people can read free, and in the future I’ll offer new stuff. It’s just that right now, nothing feels right for the audience there. Okay, I do have one story that feels right, but I’m waiting to submit that story to Angry Robot when they have their next open submissions event. If they reject me, then I’ll post it on Wattpad. As for Goodreads, I mostly use it to keep track of what I’m reading, and I don’t see much point to bugging people with constant recommendations of my books. My blog posts are part of my profile, so if people want to know what I’m selling, they already have a way to do that without me being too intrusive on their social time.

This is all more of my stumbling attempts to experiment with a marketing approach that brings in new readers without getting on peoples’ nerves. I know what annoys me when I’m online watching other authors going overkill with their sales efforts, and I don’t want to do that. Hopefully people will appreciate these efforts to respect their boundaries, but we’ll see how it goes.

In conclusion, I’d like to hear your thoughts on my experiments. Is there anything you’d like to see me doing or not doing on any of my platforms? If you have any ideas for how I can make my various social accounts more useful, feel free to comment here, or on Goodreads, or Facebook, or Twitter. And as always, thanks for spending time with my crazy ass.