Adrenaline, Online Presence, and Invisibility

This will be short and to the point because FINALLY the boat is back in the water - all repairs completed. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did, and kept us on dry land days past our original splash date. But it's all over, now. We hit the ground running at 5AM. The boat was in the water at 10:30 this morning. My father and I have been on the water since, delivering the boat back to its regular slip. Add in two solid adrenaline rushes while I did things with that boat I'd (A) never done before and (B) had no idea I could do and you may understand that my brain is oozing out my ears. Maybe you've hear that the most exciting parts of flying an airplane are landing and taking off. In boating, the most terrifying parts are getting off the dock and then putting the boat back on the dock (without killing anyone or sinking anything). So. I'm pretty much toasted. But I can tell you about my online presence, such as it is.

Website: There are really none of the following save the author website that I think are critical - and I know a couple of authors who laugh at even that. They have no website at all. Their argument is that if you're looking for information on them, they want you to find their books, not them. Shrug. Dunno. I have a website.

Blogging: I have three. Word-whores, Darker Temptations, and my much neglected personal blog. I tried working both on Blogger and on Wordpress. One person swore that Wordpress made it much easier for you to be discovered - or to go viral, however, I saw no real difference between the two. Thus the Wordpress blog will be closed out and the content there will be moved over to the longer running Blogger site.

Twitter: I am on Twitter where I listen more than I speak. I find my snark is strongest on Twitter and I have to rein that in. It's way too easy for that to come off as mean. Do Not Want. So I listen until I have a ridiculous day that begs for quick shots into the great dark expanse of the interwebs - mostly about the boat or the cats.

Facebook: I have an author page and my regular page. FB has done their best to make FB utterly useless and irrelevant in the recent past. Not that I'm bitter. Author pages are no longer visible to your followers unless you pay FB's extortion - ehem - page promotion fees. Thus, I've asked anyone who liked my author page to friend me on my regular page, assuming they can handle the cat photos and geeky silliness I post there. I'm nowhere near my friend limit and at least the few book updates I post have a shot of showing up on someone's feed.

Tumblr: Lurvs Tumblr. Most of my reblogging is science, artwork, fashion I will never get to wear, and assorted stuff that tickles me. This is the least 'branded' thing I do. Which may be why it's so much fun. I'm not in the least concerned that I might 'do it wrong'.

The Thing I Do Not Have and Am Likely to Never Have: Pinterest. I know my limits. And I know a massive, unending, never write again time sink when I see one.

Curious thing. I am not crazy about any of my online presences. Some writers have spent most of their lives being invisible. The sudden emphasis on getting online and staying online in a meaningful (and up to date way) can feel overwhelming, impossible, intrusive or any combination of those things. Those of us who fall into that category are bucking the tide to get online in the first place and when we do, we're plagued by constant inadequacy neuroses about them. All of them. If you fall into the category with me, take a deep breath, and do one thing. Right or wrong. Pick one. Start there. Bonus points if you can make it fun for yourself. I know. That sounds like an oxymoron. Think of it as challenging your comfort zone. You're stretching. Growing. And getting your website online.

Thoughts on My Online Presence

There's something strangely meta about writing about my online presence here, as this is part of my online presence.  My blog-writing is more or less the centerpiece of it.

Managing one's online presence, especially as an author (or any other creative-type-promoting-oneself) can be a full-time job in and of itself.  No one has time for that.  I'm actually quite surprised when I see big names constantly blogging, tweeting, facebooking, etc.  But, hey, if they can make it work, good for them.  There's no way I can do that.

Here's a piece of advice I received on the subject a few years ago: Pick one aspect of on-line presence to be your center-of-gravity.  This is the primary place you'll put original content.  For me, it's my blog.  Every other bit of social media or online presence should be designed to direct back towards that central presence. 

That means that my Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. are all designed to be a public face, and lead you back toward the blog, which is where you'll see new and interesting things from me.

I even linked my blog to my LinkedIn and Goodreads page.  Those update automatically when I do.  And that way I can put most of my online-presence energy into writing creative and interesting content here, and still have energy to also write books. 

And that's important, because what's the value of having the online presence if it isn't in service of your books?

AND SPEAKING OF... over at Goodreads you can enter to win a free copy of Thorn of Dentonhill.  Head over there and sign up!

Managing Online Presence

My online presence would probably be considered minimal. I work. I parent. I like sleep. I write. There isn't a lot of time for other stuff.

WEBSITE
www.authorlindarobertson.com Though I believe a website is very important, this only gets updated every few months...if there's something newsworthy to add.

BLOGGING
I'm here at the bordello every week on Hump Day...unless I have overwhelming life stuff going on and flake out. Sometimes the attempt to muster even one word to add to the topic is a futile endeavor.

My personal blog, has gone untended for a long, long time.

FACEBOOK
https://www.facebook.com/authorlindarobertson
and https://www.facebook.com/lindarobertsonbooks
I'm here A LOT. I wouldn't say daily, but its close to that. My love/hate relationship with the big blue fb isn't a secret. Love seeing what my pals and fans are up to. Love the articles I come across that I otherwise wouldn't. Hate the game invites and yes I mean ALL of them. Did I say ALL of them? I meant ALL of them. I don't play games on fb. And I hate the general timesuck that the big blue is...but that's my fault for tuning in.

GOODREADS
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2937372.Linda_Robertson I visit here occasionally. Usually because someone has messaged me through it. My relationship with Goodreads is kind of like a phone ringing. I answer it...but more often than not its a sales call.

Book recommendations sent me are useless, as are inviting me to online events and all those book requests from foreign countries. I agreed to send one, once. Then learned my lesson. It cost me about twenty dollars to send one book to a blogger in Romania. I'd have to sell more than 32 books to break even. I'm thinking that's very unlikely. And after I sent one, I got dozens of requests from others. I wish I could. Truly.

TWITTER
https://twitter.com/authorlinda Rarely visit here. Thought it was the thing to do, but this format just doesn't enthrall me much. If I'm posting something here, I'm probably pretty excited about it.

OTHER
Ditto the above for Pinterest and a handful of other places that I don't remember the names of. When I got a new phone, I didn't even bother downloading the apps I had on the former phone. I've added only fb (no messenger tho), Spotify, weather, calendar and a History channel app. Oh, and the one game I do play: Spider Solitaire.

A Brief History of Jeffe's Online Presence

Yesterday, Chis Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo - or National Novel Writing Month for those not into hip blended terms - came to speak to my local RWA chapter, LERA. He started the annual event in 1999 with six friends. A fascinating story, about how it's grown to 400,000 participants and the huge role social media has played in that growth. For example, in the early days, writers would email him their word counts and he built progress bars manually with blocks of color.

Can you imagine?

At any rate, it was interesting to hear this history and recall that, in 1999, though we had the Internet, most people were not using it socially the way we are today. It makes this week's topic of Managing Your Online Presence: How, Where, How Often, Why Did You Choose the Platforms You Did? that much more apropos.

I've never been a first implementer on new tech - have never been the one to have to have the newest, snazziest thing - but, to my ongoing surprise, I tend to be a fairly early implementer. So here's a rough chronology of my online presence.

Email

I started using A-1 Mail back in the late 80s, on my university server. Clunky and not terribly useful because so few people were on it. By the mid-nineties, however, Hotmail and some other free email services became available and I used them extensively to talk to friends and family. I might have been a driving force there, encouraging people to sign up so we could communicate.

Instant Messenger

 I can't recall exactly when IM kicked in, except that it went more or less in tandem with increasing email use. I'm sure we were using it in the mid-nineties, playing with dressing our avatars, etc. This was even better than email, allowing for much more immediate daily contact.

Website

I put up my first website in 2003. My first book - my essay collection, Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel - came out in March of 2004, so I had a website designed for that, with the JeffeKennedy.com domain name. Before that I'd had a website I made myself called BrightLynx.com, where I posted a lot of my experimental work and news of published essays and awards. It's too bad that these things predate even Google (I recall using HotBot as my favored search engine), so I don't think there's even a cache anywhere of these early sites. Too bad. I think I paid $1500 for that professional website and then maintained it myself.

Listservs and Email Loops

A lot of people signed up for - or were co-opted - into Listservs long before I was. I kind of resisted those. And no one insisted I be on them. However, particularly when I joined RWA in 2008, I started learning to be part of email loops, first to take online classes and then to participate in my online groups like the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Chapter of RWA.

Blogging

I started a blog in 2009. Long after many of my friends had started bugging me to do it, saying I'd be a natural. That original blog, Love, Power and Fairytale Endings, is still preserved forever (?) on Blogger and those posts have also been imported into my current blog on my website. My first blog post ever is here and kind of amusing to read. Word Whores was my first ever group blog (aww), which I helped Allison Pang start in 2011, along with sister original Word Whores Linda Robertson, Kristine Krantz and Marcella Burnard.

Facebook

I joined in early 2009 when I started blogging, for the express purpose of pimping my blog posts. At the risk of going all nostalgic and glory days about it, Facebook was great fun back then. It was an explosion of rediscovering casual contact with all kinds of people I hadn't talked to in forever. I later capitulated and added my Author Page, because my publisher told me to. I'm still there, because there are so many people I wouldn't be in touch with otherwise, but every day I consider bailing...

(I should note here that I joined MySpace at the same time as Facebook, for the same reason. I don't recall making the decision to leave - my presence there just kind of faded away. Pretty quickly, too. I missed its glory days and never much liked it.)

Twitter

I joined Twitter a bit after Facebook, in September of 2009. I love Twitter. It's my favorite online presence. I really hope they don't go all Facebook on me. It's amusing, I get this weekly report on my Twitter activity. They recommend I tweet at least once a day in the same breath that they inform me I've tweeted 600 times that week. I like Twitter.

Goodreads

 It looks like I joined Goodreads in June 2010. It's not as easy to discern on there. Goodreads is still one of my favorite online places to be, particularly as I can track what I'm reading and it crossposts to Facebook and Twitter. I have great conversations over books, which has always been one of my very favorite activities.

Tumblr

I'm pretty sure Tumblr counts as my most recent online presence effort. Before you do any clicking, know that many of the pics are very explicit and sexy. I started Jeffe's Closet on a whim in March of 2013. I decided that, since I was looking at a lot of the pictures anyway, and I'd noticed that I preferred some people's collections far better than others, that I might as well make use of that time spent. I was nervous because I thought it might attract creepers. Instead I have a loyal following of people who love what I love. It's been amazing. Particularly when a famous author tells me stories about her senior citizen mother trolling my Tumblr. Makes a girl proud.

What I draw from this (not so brief) history is that my answer to the topic question, particularly Why Did You Choose the Platforms You Did? is that it happens pretty organically for me. I tend to do what I like doing and fall away from the stuff I don't like. MySpace, for example. More recently, I did get on Google Plus, because I was supposed to, but I rarely go there. This organic process makes sense to me because social media SHOULD be that way. It's an outgrowth of our human sociability. My online presence is really just another facet of my presence in the world. Where and how I choose to be online is much the same as where and how I choose to go hiking or to parties or even to the grocery store.

It's all good.