This post’s subject header was taken from the “Gloucestershire Wassail”, which is a traditional English Christmas song. I spent part of my day earlier listening to traditional French holiday music in order to get myself worked up over my next historical fantasy novel. Nope, it doesn’t take place during the holidays, but there’ll be lots of snow in it – and for good reason. No spoilers, though.

Anyway, I just randomly latched on to that line because I couldn’t come up with one that’s more appropriate. Might as well liven things up around here by throwing you off.

The past several days, the indie publishing scene was suddenly all abuzz about social networks and marketing, and I’ll have to say that those blog posts couldn’t come at a better time. Susan Kiernan Lewis, Kristin Kathryn Rusch, and J.A. Konrath all talked about the ineffectiveness of social media when it comes to marketing one’s books. And what they say pretty much lines up with my thoughts about networking based on my own experiences, all of which convinced me to damn what “experts” say and stick to my blog and maybe Twitter for what I need.

Do I start to believe that selling your book has bollocks to do with social media?

Is it possible that the prevailing belief that having an online platform is essential to a book’s success is wrong? Are we all just the cool kids playing with the latest gadgets and wanting them to be essential and really they’re irrelevant? Is it really the author’s platform that’s important? Is that why YOU buy a book?

Isn’t it about the damn book? Read more

From a writer’s viewpoint, I’ve seen just how little effect social media have when it comes to bringing in sales. Yes, they work – to a point. And a lot of the results depend on many factors, all of which are already explored in those articles I linked to. My experience overall has been poor, regardless of where I go, and I know I’m not the only one who goes through this. Twitter is this world of infinite noise, where your tweet is only a drop in the proverbial bucket. The chances of people latching on to it and retweeting it is miniscule unless you’re being followed by hordes of faithful fans who hang on to your every word. Not so in my case. Even a link to a blog post here doesn’t get clicked on, but when I’m lucky, I might have one or two out of over 300 followers checking out what I have to say. Goodreads? Well – I left all my groups, deleted my blog, and just kept my account if only to be able to access Goodreads’ database and update it with new books.

I went through a bit of a crisis of sorts recently because of experiences I had over at Goodreads, and those articles pretty much hit me over the head with what’s so obvious. I really should be focusing more on writing and improving, not wasting time hobnobbing with everyone. Another aspect of that crisis involves the need to set firmer goals for myself where publishing’s concerned.

I wanted desperately to supplement my novels with short fiction, but I simply can’t do it, and it’s frustrating. Unless a filthy rich, distant relative ups and dies and decides to leave all his wealth to me, there’s just no way for me to free up the time to do what I really want to do, which is to focus on both long and short fiction. Then I went back and reassessed those short stories I contracted with Queerteen Press and saw that I even managed to fool myself there, though temporarily.

It might seem as though I’m über prolific, but I’m not. All eight of those short stories were already written between 2001 and around 2005. A few were published before, but I now have my rights back, and by and large, they all sat in my writing folder for years before I thought to do something with them. So, no – I didn’t start with a clean sheet of paper for each of those stories. Would I realistically be able to divide my time between new short fiction and new novels? Not with a day job, I can’t.

If I were to choose, I’d rather focus on novels, at least until I finally leave my day job behind. Pipe dream, that. The long and short of this is that I want to beef up my backlist in some way, and if I can’t manage a combination (my ideal), I think I’m better off focusing on one or the other. And since I’m a lot more comfortable writing longer stuff, I’ll stick to novels, and in order for me to achieve my writing goals for the year, social networks simply have no place in the grand scheme of things. I already took Twitter off my sidebar.

It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out with my short stories. At the moment, it’s way too early to tell, but I’ll definitely be keeping close tabs on them. Maybe what I’ll see will end up reshaping my goals, who knows?