Does networking work?

Paula’s thoughts about social networking

Way back in 2009, when I started writing romance novels again after a 20+ year break, I began to explore Yahoo groups and then Facebook. This was two years before I had another book published, but by June 2011 when ‘His Leading Lady’ was released, I had a fair amount of online friends. Two years later, and with four more books published, I’ve continued to expand my online friendships. It’s true to say many ARE now my friends, and not just names, because we’ve exchanged comments, often to the point of feeling as if we’re having a real life conversation. I’ve made more friends through several FB groups too, notably the GBE2 and Writers’ Post groups.

Blogging has also helped. I make a real effort to visit and leave comments on friends’ blogs, probably two or three each day (on average). I took part in the Six Sentence Sunday group for about 18 months, and the April A-Z blogging challenge for the last 3 years, and ‘met’ more people through both of those. Inviting people to be a ‘Friday Friend’ here has strengthened many friendships, as has being a guest blogger elsewhere.

I don’t spend as much time in the Yahoo groups as I used to, as many of these seem to contain only promotion, but I often follow the links on the loops to different blogs. I also dabbled in Twitter for a time, but I found it difficult to keep up with all the activity there (especially as a lot of it seemed to be pure advertising of books).

There have been times when I felt I was spending too much time on ‘socialising’ – which I prefer to call it, rather than networking. To me, the latter implies that you are ‘using’ the networks simply to promote yourself and your books. That’s not to say I don’t advertise from time to time, but I prefer to think of it as socialising and making friends.

What I didn’t actually realise was that by doing this I was establishing an online presence for my name. Several times in the past few weeks I’ve had friendship requests from people who have said (to paraphrase one of them): “I see you around so often on different pages I thought we were already friends.”

My ‘online presence’ came home to me last weekend. On Saturday evening, I posted a message to the effect that my next novel would be released next February, and I was looking for blog visits in February and March. Within a couple of hours, I had ten offers to host me, some by leaving a comment, others through direct messaging. By the time I got up next morning, there were five more. I know there are other friends I can approach directly to ask for a guest spot on their blogs, but what was especially gratifying about the offers was that only two of these were from bloggers I had visited in the past. The others were from other friends I have made on FB, and it’s always good to be able to visit ‘new’ blogs. I also had two offers to read and review the novel (in addition to their offers to host me on their blogs).

Bearing in mind that FB posts soon get pushed out of sight by all the other posts appearing there, I could probably repeat the request next week, and get more offers. However, I think 15 is enough for now!

One short message on FB has resulted in me being able to plan a two month blog tour. It’s also made me feel a whole lot better about the time I spend socialising on Facebook!