Image via Flickr Creative Commons, courtesy of Sally Jean

Man, I have missed you guys! Spawn flattened me with a stomach bug #kidsarecutebutevil. But, I am back so let’s get to work. All of us have days where we wonder if what we do even matters. Why did we have to become writers? Especially in these times?

Why couldn’t we have gotten into this gig when wealthy patrons financed our work? And we could seal our manuscript with a fancy wax seal like the kind we bought for ourselves at Barnes & Noble but are too shy to use on our water bill?

I know y’all bought one too, and for those who didn’t, is that a quill and ink set from the Renaissance festival I detect? Do I smell parchment?

Ah the good old days…

I am an “Old Dog” of the digital publishing paradigm. I’ve been…

Social media is powerful for connecting us (our books) with the very people we wrote them for to begin with. But, we are wise to appreciate that creating a brand and cultivating genuine and passionate fans is not going to happen overnight. The deeper the roots, the stronger the brand and the platform.

Why that is important is if we keep chasing the newest shiny, we fail to ever gain compounding results. We are chasing fad after fad. Thus a saner approach is to build places that are the most stable.

***Yes, we can build on Instagram and SnapChat and the like, but that will come with more risk and possibly devour time we need to write more books.

The blog is still the strongest and most resilient form of social media. Blogs have been around since the 90s and unless the Internet goes down? Blogs will remain.

But other…

Consumers and business models have all changed drastically in the past ten years. This demands that we as authors change as well. There were many elements we never had to think about twenty years ago. It was an agent/editor’s job to think about the consumer climate and whether or not our book would be something readers would want to buy.

There have always been writers too clever for their own good, but in the old model, likely they met with enough rejection to 1) give up 2) rewrite or 3) try again. These days? The onus is on us to give readers what they want.

We have to remember whether it is the book or the blog or even social media, that WE are not important. It is all about the reader and what he/she wants to consume.

A Tale of Two Parsnips

I remember being in NYC for Thrillerfest…