Marianne de Pierres on Authors and Social Media

Welcome to the seventh interview in the Authors and Social Media series; where I interview some of Australia’s most acclaimed speculative fiction authors as well as some rising stars.  Today we have Marianne de Pierres, who really needs no introduction, answering  5 questions on Authors and Social Media.

Sean:

How important do you view social media to selling your books or interacting with fans?

 

Marianne:

It’s a large piece of the puzzle, but ultimately we don’t know really what makes one book sell over another. I think the important thing is to be yourself when using social media – don’t try and cater to a market. Let your own personality shine through in your posts and interactions. I treat it as a tool for self-expression and communication more than “selling”.

Sean:

Do you or would you want to receive any guidance from your publisher/agent on interacting via social media, both in a technical sense or in a 'professional presentation' sense?

Marianne:

Generally publishers encourage their authors to use social media, and will give rudimentary guidelines to those who are inexperienced. (Not every author knows about or wants to know about the ins and outs of twitter, FB, and tumblr and goodreads). However, the publisher only has so much time they can spend with any one author, so a lot depends on your interest and commitment. Of course books that sell well often have their own publisher-built and maintained website, which helps, because those kind tend to look very professional.

Sean:

There have been some recent examples of inexperienced authors reacting badly on the Internet in response to blog reviews e.t.c., what are your thoughts on being social media savvy? What advice would you give to new authors?

Marianne:

Getting into an argument online with anyone is a negative experience and I wouldn’t recommend it at all. The reality is that once you put your work in the public domain, you’re exposed. You have to think about how you will handle that, and each of us have different methods. Foremost though, you need to accept that you can’t control readers’ opinions. Having said that, no one has the right to contact you and be abusive. My advice is to be very careful who you enter into a dialogue with in these circumstances, usually nothing is gained from it. If you must reply, keep it simple and don’t encourage a second reply.

 

Sean:

In my experience Social media breaks down normal communication conventions. People can be more familiar and 'take liberties'.  Have you experienced problems where this ease of communication has lead to followers/fans 'crossing the line' or has your experience been entirely positive?

Marianne:

The most common thing I encounter is that people can be quite insensitive to your time/availability and  expect you to drop everything to read their manuscript. This pre-supposes that firstly, you want to do it, and secondly, you have the time. Nothing gets me crosser than this assumption. By and large though people are pretty cool when they contact me. I love the easy familiarity, it suits my nature. If anyone crosses the line, I just don’t reply.

 

Sean:

How vital is social media to the genre in which you write and how do you think social media will effect the way you write and interact in the future?

 

Marianne:

I think SM is its own kind of publisher already and that it will only continue to solidify its role as a medium for expressing creativity, and a vehicle from which to disseminate it as well. it’s quite an exciting thought really. I’m not sure what form this will take in the future, but it will affect everything in our lives, especially the way we think and how we form relationships.

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I’d like to extend extra thanks Marianne for taking time to answer my questions while suffering from a temporary injury. 

Marianne is a prolific Australian writer, writing across genre’s as well.  Her latest is Burn Bright, a YA novel that’s part sci-fi, part steampunk, part paranormal but all 100% original de Pierres. A review from myself will be forth coming (Hint: I thought it rocked). 

You can find her work here or at most brick and mortar stores. The book depository also carries the Sentients of Orion Series the last of which(Transformation Space) won her this year’s Aurealis Award for best Sci-Fi novel.

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Trent Jamieson on Authors and Social Media

Welcome to the fifth interview in the Authors and Social Media series; where I interview some of Australia’s most acclaimed speculative fiction authors.  Today we have Trent Jamieson, Brisbane Urban Fantasy novelist answering 5 questions on Authors and Social Media.

Sean:

How important do you view social media to selling your books or interacting with fans?

Trent:

Well, it is important as a selling tool, I guess, though I've always been cautious about that. I'm sure there are plenty of people that use it more effectively than me. Let's face it, I'm not that slick. And as a consumer of Social Media I quickly tire of being hit over the head by an author's constant tweets, or facebook updates, when they're all about the book.

There's this idea of authenticity, a term that I hate because it actually sounds, well, it doesn't sound that authentic. Churning out what is essentially book spam certainly doesn't make for good reading. Maybe it works, but not for me.

What I want is the excitement of sharing ideas. I want to know what people are reading, watching, and experiencing because for me that's what I find exciting. And that's what social media at its best does.

And as a writer, and a user of Social Media, I really have to ask not so much what I'm getting out of it, but what I'm putting in. That's the important bit. Social Media is all about community, and being a good member of that community means giving not taking. Not sure that I'm doing enough of that yet, but you've caught me at a time when I'm really trying to get my head around these sorts of things.

 

Sean:

Do you or would you want to receive any guidance from your publisher/agent on interacting via social media, both in a technical sense or in a 'professional presentation' sense?

Trent:

Not really. I kind of like the ready-made nature of my blogging, tweeting and facebooking. I'm a bit suspicious of things that are too perfect, or directed. Part of me likes a bit of mess, and chaos. Like my lame Book Corner videocasts, I'm not sure I'd have had any advice to do my "book corners" but I've found them to be a lot of fun, and I think they're (oddly enough) a pretty honest representation of me.

Perhaps I should be more strategic, but yet again there's that question of authenticity.

 

Sean:

There have been some recent examples of inexperienced authors reacting badly on the Internet in response to blog reviews e.t.c., what are your thoughts on being social media savvy? What advice would you give to new authors?

Trent:

You've just gotta roll with the punches. You can't expect everyone to like what you write. Enjoy the good reviews, accept the bad ones and move on. It never looks good if you go slugging it out with a reviewer.

Let people have their opinions.

 

Sean:

In my experience Social media breaks down normal communication conventions.  People can be more familiar and 'take liberties'.  Have you experienced problems where this ease of communication has lead to followers/fans 'crossing the line' or has your experience been entirely positive?

Trent:

So far it's been pretty positive, and that's with a good six years of blogging - which isn't that long, and a year or so of tweeting.

Still, I'm a rather small fish in a very big sea - most of us are.

I'm not really different to the people that contact me, I just happen to have written a couple of books that they may have liked. Everyone I've encountered has been passionate, interested and patient - maybe I've been lucky.

I've worked as a bookseller for a decade and a half, talking about books has been what I do for a very long time, I just see it as an extension of that.

 

Sean:

How vital is social media to the genre in which you write and how do you think social media will effect the way you write and interact in the future?

Trent:

It's already vital as source of contact, and a way of seeing what's going on. It always has been in SF, just much slower. Any genre's a conversation after all, isn't?

I don't know how it will affect the way I write. The writing I do still comes from a deep and non-social place for me, it's the public expression of a private process. I don't think that's going to change for a while yet.

But, and here's the thing, when the book is written, that's when Social Media is so important. It's certainly changing the way I interact with readers. OK, I'm going to ramble on a bit here.

The book is one thing, but the point where that book ends and begins, the scaffolding around that book, how I find readers, how I let them know what the book is about, that's where Social Media is all important. Maybe we shouldn't call it Social Media, maybe something like the Conversation (Narrative is too linear and fixed, Dialogue to formal).

I've really been thinking about the permeability of a published book, particularly now they're increasingly electronic. For one thing, where the author and the reader sit in relation to each other and the book is changing. I firmly believe that a book stops being the writer's when it is published, certainly when it is purchased/borrowed whatever. It becomes the reader's. That's always been the way, of course, my Lord of the Rings is different to another reader's. The text is the same, but our experience of it will be different. But now, those experiences are vociferously and enthusiastically expressed, and there's SO many of them. Even just looking at LOTR, you've the TORN site, you have this active engagement with Tolkien's work, with the films, the books. It's part of what is keeping a brilliant book alive and vital (it helps that the book is brilliant, of course).

When I first started writing you were lucky if you got a letter of comment in the next ed of whatever mag you had sold to. Then in the years after you were lucky if you got an email. I've been so used to writing to silence.

Now that's not the case, people are happy to tell you what they think, and even if it's that they didn't like the book, well, that's healthy for the ego, innit?

Social media really lets the writer connect with that reader in a new way. A faster more vivid and scarier way, but one that's utterly thrilling. This is more than talking about word counts or dinner, this is taking the book as a conversation into new directions.

I want as many people as possible to read and engage with the ideas in my books, because I think they're important (certainly felt that enough to write them). I want them to enjoy them, I want my books to live on as arguments as a conversation.

Whether or not they do is largely beyond my control, I can only write as well as I can write, but, now, there's more chance that they will live on. As we enter an age where books are potentially never out of print, it's the ones that are vital and exciting that people can gather round and engage in/with that are going to live on.

I don't want to be closed to that. I'd like to offer my voice to that conversation too.

Yeah, you can see I'm still getting my head around all this. How I respond to social media is going be as personal as all the other choices I make in my life. But that's going to be the same for everyone. I think we're going to see a whole host of different and equally valid ways of negotiating the new world of the book, of making it both a narrative and a conversation.

There's interesting times ahead. Time to dive in, I reckon.

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I’d like to thank Trent  for answering my questions.  You can find Trent at his site. Or he goes by @trentonomicon on twitter.  I would also suggest that you check out his Book Corner videocasts, comedy gold that will give you a real sense of Trent’s playful nature.

I have also reviewed the first two books in Trent’s Deathworks series, Death Most Definite and Managing Death.

Keep your eye out for the Business of Death the next in the Deathworks Series as wells as Roil, his steampunk novel from Angry Robot.

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Nansi Kunze on Authors and Social Media

Welcome to the sixth interview in the Authors and Social Media series; where I interview some of Australia’s most acclaimed speculative fiction authors as well as some rising stars.  Today we have Nansi Kunze, Victorian based YA novelist answering 5 questions on Authors and Social Media.


Sean:
How important do you view social media to selling your books or interacting with fans?

Nansi:
In terms of selling books, I think it can be quite important. I write YA, so the ability to link to reviews and ratings of my novels on my blog or Facebook page means potentially reaching a lot of people in my target demographic. I’ve also seen quite a few readers of other people’s blogs comment that they’ll go out and buy a book that’s been favourably reviewed there – it can extend the concept of ‘word of mouth’ considerably.
As far as interacting with fans goes, I haven’t experienced a lot of that, but then I don’t really write the kinds of things that make readers want to tell me how my book changed their life! I’m not sure that I’d want a lot of fan interaction on social media, though. I think an author’s books should remain by far the most important thing about them.



Sean:
Do you or would you want to receive any guidance from your publisher/agent on interacting via social media, both in a technical sense or in a 'professional presentation' sense?

Nansi:
The main reason I’ve been using social media in my author persona for the past year or so is because I’d seen my editors’ discussions on the importance of having a web presence as an author. While I didn’t feel the need for technical guidance when I set up my social media accounts, I’ve been glad of the snippets of advice on professional presentation I’ve gleaned from editors and other people in the biz. I think there’s probably a level of guidance that would just feel restrictive; nobody wants to be told how to behave all the time. But I can’t imagine any of the agents or editors I know ever getting anywhere near that level!



Sean:
There have been some recent examples of inexperienced authors reacting badly on the Internet in response to blog reviews e.t.c., what are your thoughts on being social media savvy? What advice would you give to new authors?

Nansi:
   
Well, obviously common sense has a big part to play there! Personally, I think it’s usually as simple as reminding yourself that every time you post something on a social media site, many, many people could see it. You might be alone at your computer when you type it, but in terms of potential audience, it’s the same as addressing a packed lecture hall or discussing something at a large dinner party: you need to consider the breadth of views and backgrounds that your audience might encompass. If you’re a new author, I’d suggest asking yourself if what you’re typing seems too offensive, too personal or too revealing to say to a crowd of strangers in a lecture hall. If it is, maybe you should hit Delete instead.

Sean:
In my experience Social media breaks down normal communication conventions.  People can be more familiar and 'take liberties'.  Have you experienced problems where this ease of communication has lead to followers/fans 'crossing the line' or has your experience been entirely positive?


Nansi:I’m certainly aware of instances where that’s happened: emerging writers sending direct messages to editors and authors telling them to buy their book and the like. I’ve been very lucky, though. I’ve found Twitter in particular a wonderful way to interact with other authors, editors, bloggers and so on. That familiarity helps me feel that I’m not alone in my field, even though I live in a relatively isolated rural area (so in a literal sense I actually am alone in a field …) The one instance I’ve encountered of someone ‘crossing the line’ came about through a charity event I was involved in, rather than through social media. No real harm was done, but I learned the importance of making sure my personal email addresses aren’t made available to people I don’t know.



Sean:
How vital is social media to the genre in which you write and how do you think social media will effect the way you write and interact in the future?
Nansi:
Given that the vast majority of teenagers use social media sites, they’re clearly of considerable importance to YA writers, but good writing is still more crucial. I’d like to think that the existence of social media will mainly affect the way I write by teaching me things: how to improve my writing technique, how the strange things that happen in life change us, what makes different people tick. I don’t envisage that I’ll be writing in a way that’s calculated to work well for social media purposes or anything like that! Hopefully, what Facebook, blogs and so on will continue to offer is a way for YA readers to become aware of books and writers that appeal to them, and to keep reading on their agenda.

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I’d like to thank Nansi for taking time out of her busy day to answer my questions.  You can find Nansi at her blog. Or on twitter under @NansiKunze on twitter. 
Nansi’s latest book is Dangerously Placed available from Amazon in paperback and kindle format and from all good Australian book stores.

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If you would like to see more in this series you can subscribe to the blog through a reader or Follow me on twitter.