Self-Marketing and Social Media Meet Gag-Reflex

Five questions that are helping make Twitter, Facebook, and a blog work for me.

When my first book was being published, I was so gung-ho about getting the word out that I ignored all my introvert and perfectionist tendencies and started a blog. Blogs were new and cool then, but for me they lost their luster amid the loud crowd of questions they seemed to demand:

What should I post? How often? What do people want authors like me to post? Can I live up to their expectations? How is what I have to say, really all that interesting? What if I offend people? What if I bore people? What if I don’t want to upload photos of my new haircut or of the bruise from my botched tetanus shot or of twenty exciting things I did last Saturday?

I don’t like failing or disappointing people, I don’t like having to remember my camera, I’m fiercely staunch about maintaining a private life, and I rarely do more than two cool things in a single weekend. So it was practically inevitable that my first blog would fade and quickly die, which it did.

Almost a decade later, with my second book about to be published, I sat in a meeting at Tyndale House and listened as a whole marketing team strongly recommended that I not only blog again, but that I start tweeting too. The optimism in me promised, out load, to try. The honesty in me predicted, also out loud, that I was likely to hate trying.

But like I said, I don’t like failing or disappointing people. So this time around, I’ve been asking myself a different, more me-friendly set of questions. As it turns out, they’re more marketing-friendly too:

What do I like? The kind of marketing that will get done is, for the most part, the kind that’s enjoyable. Some authors like posting every life event on Twitter; to me the very idea of doing that is nauseating. Some authors market themselves by latching on to controversy; most of the time I find controversy shallow and uninteresting. Ultimately I have to stick with what works for me. This means devoting the majority of my professional energy toward marketing channels and strategies that I enjoy.

What is sustainable? Start small, work out the kinks, and grow from there. If I want to be doing this for a long time, then I can’t burn out on one huge, sparkly, energy-draining idea.

What is a blog? For the perfectionists in the room, a pertinent answer here is that a blog is just a blog. It’s not fancy in the way that a book or an article or a speech or a radio interview should be. It has a different function; therefore we should allow ourselves to accept its different form. Namely: lighten up a little on frills. We shouldn’t expect brilliant sentences every time, or even brilliant vocabulary, and we shouldn’t let ourselves get lost in hours of editing. Write, re-read, publish, repeat. Misplaced periods are still bad, but they’re not the cardinal sin here.

What’s good about social media? There are plenty of irritating things about Tweeting and status-updating. The fake access they give into somebody’s life, for instance. The constant demand for the tweeter/updater to always say something. The way social media signals the loss of an in-person age in favor of an electronically-accessed one. I could go on and on. But it’s possible even for somebody like me to stop being annoyed, by focusing on the good of social media and forgetting the bad. I like to use Twitter as my online author meet-and-greet, for instance: By taking a handful of seconds to welcome each new follower, often asking a question or making a comment about something in their profile, I’m connecting with my audience in a useful and personal way.

What honors the gospel? Being a Christian is more important than being a writer. God’s glory is better than my own. It’s possible that at times this could mean less popularity and fewer book sales. Which is to say: popularity and book sales are never the ultimate measure of things.

Related Posts: Reluctant Blogger, Blogging, How to Love A Book