Moving away from the banality of click-bait self-promotion in the #writingcommunity
I am fairly new to self-publishing and the social media online writing community. I am not new to Twitter as I have a longstanding account where I hang out with my political and academic friends. My Cassandra Leigh profile is new. At first, I was quite enthusiastic about the number of people who followed me (and I still remain happy with my followers, thank you!). I did, however, quickly see interesting patterns of behaviour in this new community that make me wonder if we, myself included, cannot create a better way of interacting with each other.
With the “ceaseless stream of dumb questions, endless writers' lifts, and constant retweeting of links” (@richardhfay1) most of us are dying for true content. The issue of vapidity becomes truly apparent for me when I end up in tag post where someone thanks me for nothing but a follow, or nothing at all, or tags me and a bunch of others with no context at all. When one Twitterer complained vehemently
and justifiably about these chain-tag posts, I wondered why this in particular is so annoying.
Ultimately, the annoyance and frustration with any of these banal posts is because they are about the writer’s needs and wants with no regard to their audience. In addition to writing erotica (and more fruitfully), I teach business communication. Early on, we dissect emails to look at their errors. Inevitably, the one that is writer-centred irks them and annoys them more than those containing grammatical or spelling errors, though they can’t always identify why.
Rather than communicating with the audience, writer-centred writing, whether an email, a Tweet, or a poem, angers and annoys—it is a performance rather than a conversation or interaction, that inadvertently excludes the audience rather than engaging them. As a result, these banal Tweets and interactions, while giving the appearance of followers and likes, do not result in anyone actually buying and/or reading our work, which is part of why we are here in this social media writing community.
We all want to sell our books. We have something to say, we’ve worked hard, we want to share, but also, financially, we want to survive and thrive; we want recognition whether that comes in readership or in money. We all know there is a lot of bad writing out there (never mine of course!) as well as writing styles and subjects that don’t appeal to our tastes. We are distrustful of each other’s work, not because we think people on social media are bad, but without the vetting process of traditional publishing and marketing, we cannot be sure that the book we buy will lead to a satisfying and enjoyable journey. There are so many people promoting their work, I can’t possibly afford to buy them all, even if they are only $1.29, let alone find the time to read them. Given this atmosphere, trust in the quality of writing is low and false self-promotion does nothing to help.
How, then, can we build trust amongst each other within this writing community and further our creative work as a result? As with business, or because book promotion is business, this requires building
genuine relationships rather than establishing fleeting connections. Yes, social media is always going to be superficial (do we really know anyone here?), but this doesn’t mean that we can’t create true connection by being generous with our content and by posting and replying with genuine focus on our followers/audience.
I am suggesting that our blogs provide more than simply self-promotion (it is a great opportunity for others to see the quality of your writing) and aren’t just click-bait, space-filling fluff. Blogs, if you choose to have one, should deepen people’s understanding of who you are and of your work—they should have strong content that others want to read and that allow them to learn, experience, or grow. And our Tweets should not be about creating traffic, but about reaching out and responding to each other with a focus on what the conversation truly is rather than shaping it to our own selfish needs.
Building ongoing relationships where your audience trusts you is a long game, not a quick fix for self-promotion. It requires us to give something long before asking, to listen before we shout our promos, and to be our genuine selves. I challenge our writing community to step up and take on this relationship-building practice and look forward to seeing much more from my writing friends in the future. Let's have a conversation.
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