A month ago, I wrote the article, “8 Comments that Make You a Horrible Person” for The Huffington Post, which they published on October 30th, and a few thousand people liked, and a hundred or so shared on Facebook and Twitter.
Flash forward to last week, when suddenly those numbers started to surge. I did some searches, and found a link to the article on a Facebook page that has 1.7 million followers. 1.7 MILLION! The administrator of this page appears to post something new every 30 minutes or so, and I know a bit about the ratio of followers to engaged followers, but still, it’s likely that at least 20,000 people saw the link in their feeds. 167 clicked Like and 22 shared it. That is an amazing result. And one I could have never planned or predicted.
This is the joy and frustration of promoting one’s own writing in a wired world — it’s a crap shoot. Sometimes you get 7s and sometimes you get snake eyes. Sometimes, someone likes what you wrote, and that person has a boatload of friends or followers, and then, a lot more people like you. And sometimes, you write something that you really love and are proud of and almost nobody reads it. C’est la vie.
A lot of experiences in the past 6 months since publishing my book have taught me to be a lot more Zen — live in the moment, enjoy the rewards, dismiss the frustrations, and hope that somewhere out there, someone with 1.7 million friends will like my book, and tell them all about it.
Until then, I will just continue to plug away, creating content that I can stand behind, and hope that in my own small way, I’m making the world a better place.
As the owner of a blog where I’ve posted for a year about my own eclectic mix of writing, CFS, and whatever else catches my eye, I’m always looking for a way to publicize my writing (I’m polishing the novel one scene at a time and posting a new finished scene every Tuesday).
I’m quirky in my writing posts (that CFS-brain really affects me, but I think I would have been odd even if I weren’t ill), as I work to finish the novel in time for a publication next September. I watch all the posts about essentially going viral – which is what your accidental connection did for you – with the hopes of picking up glints of shiny that will help when I go from the free version to a self-published one.
I think your title was excellent – how can you not click on that link? Most of those turn out to be horrible, and attempts to sell you something – but yours provided value up front without torturing the reader first. I hope it got you a lot of sales – your book is also packed full of good stuff.
Even for fiction the technique should work: keep writing good content that will attract people to your writing. Once they click, make it easy to find what you write and have for sale – and have a good sample easily available.
Sounds so easy, doesn’t it?
Goes off to plan the right kind of content. Oh, wait – been doing that all along – just haven’t found the perfect title. And I’m not in too much of a rush: there is no way I can write any faster, and I don’t want anyone expecting a finished book yet.
But I watch you – and learn. Thanks! Keep writing.
Alicia
Thank you so much (as always) for this wonderful comment! It is impossible to predict these things, so all we can do is keep writing. Best of luck to you. Keep me posted.