Real relationships vs Facebook Friends

How important is it to have "good numbers" on social media? 5000 facebook friends? 5,000 twitter followers? If you have these kind of numbers many social media experts would say you are a success.

Seth Godin says not. He says what really matters is how many people you have real relationships with. By real relationships, he means how many people would go out of their way to help you. Could you email three days in advance and say, "I'll be in town" and they'd offer you a place to sleep. I think Godin has it right, again. Maybe the best number is "how many real conversations did you have?" or "how many real relationships do you have?"

Don't send important emails hastily

Lesson 1 of social media. Don't send important emails from the coffee shop as it's closing, and you are trying to get finished before the doors close.

Just re-read an email I sent, introducing myself to a literary agent. There's a TYPO in the first paragraph! GAG!

Lesson: take your time, save as a draft, reread the next day before you press SEND on an important email. (Duh.)

Caitlin Kelly and Malled

I accidentally met Caitlin Kelly by email the other day, through a writer's group I belong to. I was grousing about writers and their love-hate relationship to marketing, and Kelly referred me to the wonderful social media writer, Kristen Lamb.

After a couple email exchanges I Googled Kelly, and was shocked to realize I was talking to a New York Times writer and the author of the new book Malled: My unintentional career in retail.

Small world.

Kelly writes about what it's like to work retail for $7 to $10 an hour, after a career as a highly paid and successful print journalist. She explores the whole retail chain from the Chinese factories to the people who sell us things in the local mall. Malled is coming out on April 14. You can order your copy here.

Writers Need Kristen Lamb!

Kristen Lamb is the best writer on social media for writers that I've found in two years of researching the subject.

In her best-selling book We Are Not Alone she tells writers how to use social media to build a circle of relationships. These relationships are the basis of the "platform" that publishers and agents now want writers to have.

I can't say enough good about her book. She demystifies social media, tells writers how to succeed, and she does it with laugh-out-loud humor. Buy. Read. Use.

Kristen Lamb's blog: Good idea to subscribe to her blog posts.
We Are Not Alone: If you are a writer, independent film maker, or artist, you should stop what you are doing, buy this book and spend the next two days to reading it. It is that important.

Research tools for writers and filmmakers

A few useful research tools and resources for writers and documentary filmmakers.

HARO
ProfNet
ExpertClick

Quora

Wikipedia
Facebook
LinkedIn

The Truth About Traditional Publishing?

Amanda Hocking is selling thousands of ebooks without a traditional publisher. (h/t to Carl King of Carl King Creative for telling me this story.)

Read this article from business insider first.

Then read her response to the press on her blog.

And finally, read "how I did it."

At one point in "how i did it" she says she thinks her books sell well because:

"-the books are in a popular genre
-the covers are enjoyable
-the price is good
-the writing isn't terrible (although, believe me, some people would argue that point)
-book bloggers recommended it
-accessibility - I'm on Twitter, facebook, goodreads, Amazon, KB. I'm anywhere I can be. I always try to respond to readers..."

And I'd add to what she said...
- writing 7 hours a day for about 10 years before she ever published a word.
- choosing really great titles. Titles that "stick" in your mind, things like "my blood approves"
- working obsessively on marketing
- writing the same kind of book that she reads, writing in a genre she likes.
- starting small, dashing off novel after novel quickly (call them beta versions)
- finding and working with an editor (she's still looking for a better one)
- being willing to fail repeatedly and keep going. Sounds like her mantra was something like:
"OK, learned something. Good! Keep going, try something else."
- shipping stuff. She finishes the novels she starts and then submits the finished work for publication.
- damn luck. All the planets were in alignment, at the right time, in the right place, and significant book bloggers liked her stuff.

More power to Amanda Hocking! I truly hope she becomes a zillionaire. I applaud her success. She sounds like someone I'd like to have coffee with and talk to about writing.

Finding your passion

Tips for finding your passion:

Pay attention to things that interest you, even if you don't know why you are interested.

When writing about difficult things, especially those which are highly emotional, remember Maxwell Perkins advice: "Don't get it right, get it down."

Start a "Maxwell Perkins journal." Write about one experience per page. Put one word at the top of the page that gives the main idea about what you wrote. After a few months, sort the pages into piles.