Social networking and the self-published author

by Myne Whitman

My first book, A Heart to Mend was published via Authorhouse in December of 2009. Before then, I had started my blog in August and started advance publicity for the book a couple of months later. Setting up an active blog and publishing my book served a double purpose for me; finding out the target audience for my kind of writing and building a platform too. If not for the social networking channels, A Heart to Mend would never have gone viral the way it did. And for that, I will always be grateful for the vehicle that social media provides to a writer and self-published author like me to get my book out there.

It was through the support of bloggers that I did my first blog tour for A Heart to Mend with the attendant publicity. By the end of that blog tour, I was getting requests for interviews and features almost daily. I put up chapter one of the book on a free reading website freado.com and it became a massive hit. It remained in the top 10 for three consecutive months! The publishers of the website did an interview with me and featured it on their front page.

The beauty of social media was that I could remain in my work room with just my laptop and an internet connection, and meet up with these dozens of interviews. As time went on, I continued networking with other writers and self-published authors and I shared what I had learnt, I picked up some good nuggets from them too. I set up a Twitter page and opened up my Facebook profile for use with my pen name. As I became more adept at using the word-of-mouth tools on those two sites, the visibility of A Heart to Mend quadrupled. I learnt how to interconnect these media, how to set up scheduled tweets or how to update Facebook via RSS feeds, etc.

After noting these advantages of using social networking, the challenges has to be pointed out too, and the major one is distraction. For me, Facebook has proved the most addictive. I find that sometimes while updating my pages, I may stray into something else entirely and so on, thereby wasting precious time that could have been put to better use. One day I took a break from writing and as usual, the first point of call was Facebook. The site was down, and I kept refreshing it for almost five minutes before it dawned what I was doing. I laughed at myself, left a message on Twitter about my addiction and went to check some other things. I had to really think that day but it is what it is. Apart from work, Facebook is also the only place I can keep in contact with all my family and most of my friends.

Finally, I think the reason social networking worked so well for me as a writer and publisher is because I am a social person. During the times I am not writing, I enjoy the company of other like-minded people and being able to use the Internet and social networking to connect to more and more people in my writing life is a thing of learning and also of pleasure. At the end of the day, I have to find a way to strike a balance by ensuring that my internet use is mostly purposeful and in a way that is linked to my writing and also setting out a specific time for my writing itself without any distractions. That way, I still get a lot of writing done while remaining in the social circles.

Platform-Building Crusade

I’ve always been a fan of the idea that if you help someone, they will help you: I follow you, you follow me etc, and in this small lonely world of writers where support is “while you’re on the computer, check the cinema times, eh?” and acknowledgment “not given up the writing malarkey, yet?”, news that other writers with similar feelings makes us feel better. Well, it makes me feel better!

Then I come across a blog by Rachael Harrie who has thought up this ingenious idea called, Platform-Building Crusade.

Well, don’t let me tell you about it, read it yourself: click!


 

MRS. LIEUTENANT: A Sharon Gold Novel

BY

 Phyllis Zimbler Miller

They had their whole lives to look forward to if only their husbands could survive Vietnam. In the spring of 1970 - right after the Kent State National Guard shootings and President Nixon's two-month incursion into Cambodia - four newly married young women come together at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, when their husbands go on active duty as officers in the U.S. Army. Different as these four women are, they have one thing in common: Their overwhelming fear that, right after these nine weeks of training, their husbands could be shipped out to Vietnam - and they could become war widows. Sharon is a Northern Jewish anti-war protester who fell in love with an ROTC cadet; Kim is a Southern Baptist whose husband is intensely jealous; Donna is a Puerto Rican who grew up in an enlisted man's family; and Wendy is a Southern black whose parents have sheltered her from the brutal reality of racism in America. Read MRS. LIEUTENANT to discover what happens as these women overcome their prejudices, reveal their darkest secrets, and are initiated into their new lives as army officers' wives during the turbulent Vietnam War period.

Is Mrs Lieutenant your debut novel?

“Mrs. Lieutenant” is the only published novel I’ve written. I self-published it at the time that it was named an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semi-finalist. (Many years ago I wrote a series of mystery novels that my agent couldn’t sell.) And I have just self-published “Four Comedy Screenplays” – two of which I wrote with my husband Mitchell R. Miller and two I wrote myself. I self-published in April of 2008 (see http://www.mrslieutenant.com/ ) and I wish I knew then what I know now about social media. This is why I often write book marketing posts -- to help other authors.

Can you tell us a little about Mrs Lieutenant?

The novel is based on the experiences I had as a new Mrs. Lieutenant at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, in the spring of 1970 during the Vietnam War. I’ve mashed together people from that time and other times to create the fictional characters.

Mrs Lieutenant is a fictional story based on a real event – the Vietnam war – yet you proclaim to be anti-war so why write about a war that happened forty years ago?

I am not anti-war; my fictional character Sharon Gold starts out as an anti-war protester. And although she is the novel’s character most like me, I am an active online supporter of our U.S. troops today.

I wrote the novel to preserve a very specific slice of women’s social history at the beginning of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S.

How does it compare with other novels in its genre?

I tried to make my novel very realistic in order to give readers a better understanding of military life. And I told the story from the point of view of four young women in order to avoid a single perspective.