Fiction Marketing is hard.

[VydorScope]

Page I stumbled up.... some good stuff in it.

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2013/...ion-marketing/

[gmw]

A good article, thanks for the link. The only item I have some slight disagreement with is that last. Sure there are some readers that obviously like internet-social interaction with an author, but I'm not convinced that this can ever be anything more than a very small proportion of readers - who are quite likely fans whether you have a twitter/facebook/blog account or not.

Yes famous authors may have lots of followers, but that's not to say they are famous because they have lots of followers, rather - most of the time - they have lots of followers because they are famous. How critical social networking is to establishing fame is much less apparent. A twitter account, facebook page and blog are all useless when no one knows who you are. You start be being found where the readers are - and that's not on your blog (or certainly not on mine ).

I can suppose that producing lots (that people want to read) is a way to keep your presence active in conversations and so increase your fan base that way. (We talked of a catalogue of books in another thread.) But I see this as quite distinct from social networking.

Of course, I'm not famous, so perhaps I can blame it on my lack of social skills.

[crich70]

I'd think the # of authors who are interacting with readers on the internet must be small myself. After all if they're writing e-mails back to every reader who sends them an email then they're not doing the writing that they want others to read. I mean an author may respond to a few emails now and then but if they"re getting several hundred emails a day or something from fans and they try to keep up with replies when will they find the time to do the actual writing of their next story or book?

[Turtle91]

I have had opportunity to email several authors over the years...well, AFTER Al Gore invented the internet ... and I have definitely been much more favorable to those authors who took the time to respond. I wouldn't expect them to respond to ridiculous emails like telling them how they are developing the character the wrong way, but cogent/pertinent emails should be replied to...it's common courtesy.

[gmw]

Turtle91, if you wrote to me I'd be sure to respond , but I suspect authors like J.K.Rowling (just to pick one obvious example) may have some difficulty offering "common courtesy" to all attempts to contact her. Of course once you get to a certain point you can afford to pay someone to be courteous of your behalf.

I used to read a lot of Piers Anthony and quite enjoyed the notes he would put at the end where he discussed letters he had received and so on (this was back before the man-on-the-street used the Internet - which is an amusing turn of phrase, I thought, since it can be taken quite literally now). He did try to respond to all first-time writers, but spoke of just how many hours in a day that could take.

More recent reading concerning social networks discusses how this practicality pans out in reality. (I don't have the links to hand, I think it was something by Bruce Schneier or Clay Shirky.) There are fairly predictable points and stages at which "social networks" turn from real interaction to fans only following the one becoming famous.