Friday Feast: Social Media as Bookseller, Author Platform Defined, Bookish Twitter, Twitter Fiction, and Book Art

Many authors’ reactions to using social media are akin to being forced to eat your green peas as a kid. Look, I hate green peas. But if you add a sprinkle of this and a dash of that (or add them to a stew, so the peas don’t taste so pea-like), they become more palatable.

Like green peas, a little bit of social media won’t kill you.* Mmm, dive in!

  • “For quite some time, social media has been promoted by nearly everybody, including publishers, as a Very Good Way to SELL YOUR BOOKS. You have a Certified Platform. It is the place where you express your Authorial Brand… This Is Now How You Sell Books. And that’s not entirely inaccurate. But it is a little bit inaccurate.” This and more on social media’s misunderstood opportunities from Chuck Wendig.
  • Authorial brand? Author platform? Say, huh? Jane Friedman explains.
  • If you’re ready to dive into bookish Twitter, but aren’t sure where to start, consult Dahlia Adler’s handy guide.
  • Speaking of Twitter, have you heard of Twitter Fiction? Before you groan, consider: “It’s the role of literature to play with forms… In poetry you have very rigid forms, and people have to operate within those constraints. With Twitter fiction, people are taking the limitation of 140 characters and doing something creative. It’s a slightly different art form and it creates a different experience of fiction.”
  • Social media isn’t all bad. It’s how we learned about these large-scale book art installations. Fun!

* Disclaimer: Green peas could maybe, probably kill you if you have a peanut allergy according to my quick Google search. So don’t do that. But social media cannot be literally touched, ingested, or inhaled, so you should be fine.

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