Thursday, November 8, 2012

Social Networking

I'll be honest, I have a Facebook page, but I don't use it much. I jumped on the bandwagon a while ago, but decided I'd only use the page for promotion of my writing career. Trouble is, a lot of the people who have friended me are actually friends and as such share non-writing releated tid bits which appear on my page. Then, I'm friends with some authors from whom I also get personal tid bits of information. And this past summer I 'cheated' a bit and posted some personal items on my page.

Now I will be the first to admit, I'm no where near an expert on Facebook. In fact, I'm pretty much a total idiot. I need one of those books, "Facebook for Dummies". I'm sure if there's not one out there, there will be soon.

I guess my first mistake was signing up under only my author name and not my real name. In that way I could have better separated the business end from the friend end. I guess I can still do that, but it's definitely a project for when I have a good chunk of time to devote to it.

A friend was kind enough to set up a "Friends of Debra St. John" page for me. But I use that even less than my regular page.

It's just so confusing to me. There seem to be multiple pages that 'belong' to me and it's anyone's guess which one is going to pop up when I log in. If I had more time to devote to it, maybe it would make more sense and I'd be able to use it as a better marketing tool. But I don't. So alas, much of the time my page just sits there...not doing a whole heck of a lot.

All that said, I am going to 'host' a virtual release party on Facebook in a couple of weeks when my new novella comes out. We'll see how that goes. It took me forever to figure out how to send the invite out, but I think I located the proper 'button' and will get that announcement out next week.

So, how about you? Any opinions about social networking? Likes? Dislikes? Successes? Failures?

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com

Coming November 21 for Thanksgiving - An Unexpected Blessing

5 comments:

  1. I have a 'personal' page and also an 'author' page on FB, and actually use the latter most of the time. I also have my blog networked to my author page, but I tend to look on it more as 'getting to know people' rather than as a marketing tool.
    Good luck with your virtual release party!

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  2. Thanks, Paula. I think it's mostly I just don't have time to keep up. Something always gets neglected, and it's usually the social networking.

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  3. I don't have either a personal or author FB page.
    I don't have enough time to write, so I don't want to get sucked into Facebooking.

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  4. Ana, once you're published, you have to spend more time getting your 'name out there' than you spend actually writing your books! FB, Twitter, Goodreads, yahoo loops and blogging - it's SO time-consuming, and I'm not sure what good it actually does, but these days it's expected of every author.

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  5. You said it, Paula. It's totally expected of us, and I don't know if it actually does one bit of good.

    Ana, I'm with you. There are definitely not enough hours in the day to get quality writing done, let alone all of this other stuff. *sigh*

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