Day 63: Wondering about social media platforms

Aside from doing some house chores, I spent most of today cleaning up my desktop and filing away all the random stuff I didn’t bother to file away during the week. I also made Bible verse images and scheduled them to post during the week on Instagram, Twitter, and my two Facebook author pages.

I’m reading various marketing books (still) and one mentioned that it’s more effective to have unique content on each social media platform rather than posting the same things to all of them. I can understand the author’s point, but it’s just a lot of work.

Twitter is probably my bane because I absolutely do not know how to effectively tweet. So many people on Twitter are very pithy and clever and they can post neat things throughout the day. I cannot. I usually only check Twitter once a day—maybe twice—so I would not be able to do sporadic Tweets, nor would I respond in a timely fashion to people who reply to me. In the past, I tried checking Twitter more often, but it broke up my day too much and made my writing time less productive, so I decided to stop, because writing trumps social media.

Facebook seems to be a bit more laid-back (or maybe it’s just the people I’m friends with on Facebook), and I can respond to people on my author pages once a day. Most of my readers are on Facebook as opposed to Twitter or Instagram, so it only makes sense for me to be more active there.

The marketing book I was reading mentioned that Twitter isn’t great for selling books, and it’s more effective for connecting with other authors. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do get very little engagement on Twitter except with other author friends. The problem is that a lot of Japanese people are on Twitter and my Bible verse images are in both English and Japanese. Also, I get a lot of hits on my blog posts from Twitter.

The best thing about social media is that it’s easy to experiment to see what works, so I decided to try varying the content on my two Facebook author pages so they’re not posting the same thing every day. It took a bit more time than just scheduling a post on Hootsuite, but I’ll see how my reader engagement is after a few weeks.

I also still posted my Bible verse images on both Twitter and Instagram, even though that marketing book said Twitter isn’t effective as a marketing platform. But it doesn’t cost me anything to post and I’m not going to be bothering anyone since I’m just a couple posts out of millions of posts every hour. I post on Instagram mostly because I have a lot of friends and family on there, not really to do any type of marketing.

So I’ll see how that goes, and if I get more reader engagement.

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On another note, I’m feeling a bit insecure about starting the writing phase of my book tomorrow. I haven’t written prose since earlier this year, and the little I wrote of volume 2 was a mess because I just didn’t have a good enough grasp of the overall series plot at that point. Which was why I went ahead and plotted all the books in the series at once.

But now I have to jump back into writing and dictation, and I’m feeling rusty. Like really rusty. Like you’ll need to whack me with a wrench a few times just to loosen me up enough to get a few inches of movement.

I again looked through a dictation book whose exercises I intend to try out: Fool Proof Dictation: A No-Nonsense System for Effective & Rewarding Dictation. I’ve read about 7 books on dictation so far, and this one by far has the most unique approach to getting your brain trained to dictate fiction rather than having it flow out of your fingers to your keyboard. I found that I can use my Regency serial novel for several of the exercises in place of the prompts, so the exercises can actually work to help progress my serial novel writing.

I’m going to ease my way into things tomorrow and do several exercises before starting work on volume 2 of my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. I’m keeping my expectations low, and hopefully I’ll be able to ramp up my productivity after a week or so.

Also, I might need to spend some hours each day working on my scene spreadsheet and blocking future scenes so that I can more efficiently dictate my prose, so I don’t think I’ll be dictating 6-8 hours a day.

I set up all my dictation equipment today and tested everything out, so I’m ready to jump in when I wake up. Wish me luck!