Social Media, Writers and fear of the Tweet

I first met Bill Munro at the South East branch of the Society of Authors. Coming from a long line of taxi drivers, he is a writer and a publisher, specialising in transport. He is also interested in anything that supports the life of a writer.

We live in exciting times. (Is that really a Chinese curse?) Change is all about us and Bill is anxious to explore new opportunities that appear to be opening up for authors.

Here he explains his tentative approach towards social media and asks for advice. I've given my response at the end, but if Bill is standing at the brink with a toe in the water, I'm still only paddling around...so if you have any observations, advice, words of encouragement or caution please do jump in.                                                        Photo by Ernst Vikne

Guest post from Bill Munro 

Twitterphobia

 It took a long time for me for the penny to drop about Twitter: what it’s all about, I mean, not how to make the best use of it. That bit, I’m still struggling with. Anything on a computer that has proved successful over the years has been an adaptation, and often an enhancement of something us of the inkwell generation has used in pen and paper (or telephone or photographic) form for decades. I mean stuff like word processing (i. e. writing), spreadsheets, family tree layouts and more sophisticated stuff like DTP (which is based on the traditional editor’s cut and paste-up) and Photoshop. We all understand them in principle, so adapting our brain to use them digitally has been pretty straightforward.

Twitter, and Facebook for that matter are a quantum leap beyond.

Twitter combines the messages carried by flyers, letters, office memos, phone calls, chats over the garden wall or by the water cooler, handbills and other paper and personal stuff with new-fangled techie stuff like texts and emails. It’s a ‘word in your ear’, a soundbite and an advertising slogan, digitised and condensed. It is an adaptation of what we have done for years, but bundled up and often disguised in a plethora of technicalities and jargon and used at hyper-speed.

Many of us of an older generation have learned to use computers on an ad hoc basis, and haven’t the virtually intuitive way of using them that the younger ones amongst us seem to have. Thus we struggle to grasp the ‘McGuffin’ of social media, at a time when we, as struggling authors are told that it is the way we need to promote ourselves and our work. It leaves us baffled, and sometimes fuming.

When the penny dropped, I opened a Twitter account. But that penny has yet to set the machinery working. I have left it virtually unused because I don’t know the right things to say to whom, and I don’t want to look a twit (I use the word advisedly) by sending irretrievable and possibly self-harming messages into the Twittersphere, and to the wrong people. Does anyone know where I can get advice about this? And does it actually work anyway, or is the mantra ‘use social media to promote your work’ a piece of lazy journalism put about by people who have yet to achieve results but believe, rightly or wrongly, that others have succeeded in growing their writing careers through it? Is it ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, digitised?

Bill Munro

www.billmunro.co.uk

http://cabdriverhistory.blogspot.com/

View Earlswood Press ebooks on Smashwords at www.smashwords.com

My response:

Last December I gave eight reasons why I found twitter useful to me as a writer and as a  lecturer in writing and eight months on I pretty much stand by them. I work a lot from home and, wonderful as that is, there's no denying that I miss the water cooler moments. You can't just write, write, write. Y
How to get started? Relying on the kindness of strangers has always worked for me and writers tend to be generous. They know how to share.
I've found the blog of the Scottish writer Nicola Morgan enormously helpful and she has now put all her advice about twitter into an ebook. It is not only useful, it is also a lesson in on how a writer can build a readership using social media.

You can follow Bill on twitter at @MunroBill 

I'm there too at @agoodconfession