A great deal has changed since I started this ebook adventure with The Mary Shelley Game last October. I think 2012 is turning out to be a MONSTER year.
After my initial reluctance (read fear and loathing) I forced myself to take a class on social media at F.I.T. I became a regular blogger and — drum roll — a devoted fan of Twitter. I started connecting with other writers on LinkedIn and follow a few too many blogs to mention here. I now have helpful friends in Australia and seven of my short stories have been included in an ebook put out by Mardibooks — a British writers’ collective.
None of this would have happened if I’d buried my head in a technophobe sandbox. That’s why I’m starting to sound like a cheerleader and not my usual skeptical self. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a story vampire and I’ll morph anything I see or hear into fiction with a dark or ragged edge, but on the Internet I’m an optimist.
This week alone has been extraordinary. On Tuesday, my Bram Stoker’s Summer Sublet announcement went live on Indies Unlimited. If you have yet to discover this site — find it. Indies Unlimited features all sorts of Indie books and authors. Whatever genre you like, it’s there.
Click for the Bram Announcement on Indies Unlimited
The Mardibooks collection, “Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth,” will be available on Amazon starting Saturday! My contributions to the book are not, strictly speaking, monster tales — although one does feature mysterious creatures from “elsewhere” and the people in some of the stories are definitely MONSTROUS. I’m really looking forward to reading the stories contributed by the other authors. They come from various places around the globe, but don’t worry all the stories are in English.
Of course there’s English and English…. I was very happy that the Mardibooks folks were amenable to my US-centric grammar and spelling. You won’t find “colour” instead of “color” or any of the other Brit-centric touches that would make me seem like a poser from the other side of the Atlantic with my stories set here in the States. I hope you get the ebook and enjoy my stories including: “The Final Diet,” “The Old Man and the Tea,” and “Sex Death and High School.”
I’ll post the Amazon link to the ebook here on my blog and, of course, I’ll post it on Twitter and Facebook!
My, my, how I can relate to this post! 2012 has been the year of social media for me as well. I took to bloggng like a duck to water but FB and Twitter are still grey areas for me. It’s not the interfaces so much as the ‘why’ of it all. This is particularly true of Twitter and its 140 character constraint. Saying something meaningful in 140 characters is damn hard!
All in all though I have to agree that all of this social media madness is rather fun. 😀
I’m sure you’ll come around to Twitter. It’s like writing Haiku! The limitations are fun — once you get the hang of it.
Oops! p.s. congratulations on the soon-to-be launched book of short stories!
Congrats on your writing and future launch! I am looking forward to that soon myself! I can also totally relate about social media. I have been doing this regularly for over a year now, but you get used to it and I have met some great writers and even now have new friends! Thanks Candy!
Thanks! Best of luck to you on your launch. Social media has turned out to be full of surprises! (generally good ones)…
My blog is my only foray into the world of the interweb…. FB and twitter are alien to me, I figure I spend enough time in the blogosphere, if I had more things to keep up with I may as well abandon my family responsibilities altogether!
So glad to hear that Bram made it to Indies Unlimited, I really enjoyed it, hopefully others see it there and get to enjoy it too 🙂
I’m honestly surprised at how I’ve taken to Twitter. I was shaking in my shoes when we covered it in the social media class — dread, fear, you name it….
I’m so glad you enjoyed Bram. Please help spread the word. One of the things about not having the support of a conventional publisher is that it’s completely up to me. I tell everyone who liked it to review it, etc.
Maybe for the third Monster, I’ll venture into the world of Book Trailers and publicists. Now THAT causes my fingers to shake on the keyboard!
I wish I didn’t have to spend the kind of time that I do trying to drum up social media support for my book (http://3throughhistory.blogspot.com to read for free), but it has to be done. If I were more successful at it, I would welcome the opportunity to connect with my readership. But I still don’t see a spike in readers anywhere but in my tags on Facebook.
I don’t have the sales figures, yet, but I think it’s about gaining traction and having a LONG view. Short term is another story.
I’m with you on the FB likes. They don’t mean much. It’s about people buying the ebook, reading it, reviewing it, suggesting it to friends…
My book is getting ready for submission hopefully by the end of September. I started my blog http://www.allergictolifemybattle.wordpress.com in April to start talking about the book and issues I have faced. I have been reading a lot about self-marketing and one of the suggestions is twitter. I would love to hear how/what you do with your twitter account.
I mix it up, because it’s easy to disenchant followers by tweeting “buy, buy, buy my books” and nothing else. I think it’s important to offer something more — retweets from sties that are helpful to authors, interesting links and, in my case, Monster-related stuff that is simply fun.
A lot of it depends on what you’re writing about and what kind of image you want to project. I was terrified and now, I’m actually enjoying it!
What a surprise!
Thank you. I was going to talk about my book and issues regarding environmental illness/allergies that relate to me and the book. I can also link from wordpress directly to a twitter account.
Sounds like an interesting topic. I will check it out.
Welcome to the Twitterverse! My Twitter account is RKBs_Twitstery were I posted by Twitter novel, Executive Severance, from 2009 to 2010 and now promote same. I thinnk we’re seeing just the beginning of the influence of social media on writing, on promotion of writing and on the book publishing industry in general.
You can follow me on Twitter, I’m @CandyKorman. My Twitter approach is a work in progress. I’m mixing it up between tweets about my ebooks & my blog, with tweets about issues of interest to MONSTER fans and misc. tweets on other topics of interest to me — the arts in NYC, Argentine Tango, etc. I’m also making a point of retweeting and promoting the work of other writers and sties that support indie authors. The idea is that I’m not always pushing, pushing, pushing messages out, I’m also connecting and offering information that is useful or fun.
It is already making changes in the way people buy and sell books. We’ll see how the changes progress!