65,000 Views

I like to think that I write pretty good stories. In fact, sometimes I think they’re more than pretty good, but I am biased, so I guess the jury is still out on that opinion. Perhaps even more importantly is that I love to write stories. On the other hand, I have no such illusion of marketing my writing. I don’t like doing it and I’m not good at it. It would be fair to say that I do not understand marketing at all. Social media is the most perplexing of all. Apparently I’m supposed to try to get clicks, likes, and followers. There is no evidence that any of those produce sales, but I plug away anyway. That’s what everyone tells me I am supposed to do. And I’m told that I should blog on a regular basis, but there are rules to follow. One is that I should stay around five hundred words because people reading blogs get bored and move onto other blogs if my blog is too long. That seems problematic to me since I’m trying to get them to read my books, but rules are rules.

Twitter is an interesting creature. I joined a few months ago and my follower list is steadily growing. I try to be at least slightly interesting because there are a lot of people posting at least slightly interesting stuff on the Twitter world message board. Last week I proposed the question, “Would you rather read a poorly written, but interesting story? Or, a well written, uninteresting story?” It reached 65,000 people. Many of them answered me. FYI, most of them want an interesting story, but there some who would rather read a story on how to wash your socks, as long as it is written well. Of course there were a band of elite readers who were miffed by the question because clearly they will only read the best of the best. I suppose every group of people need a band of elitist at the top.

Last week I posted a picture of grilled chicken breast because it seems that breast shots get a lot of views. My breast made it to 2,671 viewers so far. No book sales, but people are seeing my tweets. I posted a picture of Mark Twain with the quote, “I was educated once, it took me ten years to get over it.” That one was only viewed by 566 viewers. Breast are beating Mr. Twain. The good news is that the Twain quote appears to have sold just as many books as the 65,000 views Tweet. The bad news is that the only thing I’ve learned about social media marketing is that no matter how many people see my post, it appears to have no effect on book sales. On the upside, it doesn’t appear to hurt the sales either.

Well, I’m nearing 500 words, so I guess it’s time to wrap it up and go write something.

I’m at 500 words now.