This is (finally) the last entry in a 5 part series about the excuses we make for not leaping into the slightly suspicious-smelling pool that is social media. You can find links to all 5 entries here in Part 1.

5. But I’m no good at it!

This is probably the kicker. Out of all the excuses this one’s the one that is the closest to my heart. You hear over and over how a bad internet presence is worse than no internet presence. It’s pretty hard to exist online — especially with any degree of fame — without offending people and getting trolled and losing readers or being boring or self promoting too much or not enough. Any number of things can go wrong. And it’s HARD (for most people, I reckon), and time consuming, to be good at it.

Obviously what constitutes ‘good’ is subjective, but I think having a ‘good’ social media presence means one that is regular and generally one or more of the following: funny, interesting, or helpful. Which is bloody hard, let’s face it. You essentially want everything you say online to be a greatest hits of your best wit and sparkle from your day to day life, and god some days that might seem like picking raisins out of baby poo.

But the good news is, it’s just like almost anything* else: you get better at it the more you practice. I tend to think that writing (and a lot of social media is just writing, albeit maybe a different kind to the type you’re used to) is one of those magic things that you really do improve at without doing anything else but putting words on the screen, over and over, until you eventually hate those words slightly less. Maybe you even regard them with some warmth. They might make your Christmas card list, but let’s not go crazy. That aside, you can also learn by observing. Read the twitter feeds of other people and see what works and what doesn’t. See what the people you know (or want to know) seem to respond to.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of options for easing into it. If you’re inclined, as I am, toward wordiness and rambling, facebook and blogging might be more your friends initially than twitter. If you’re an unselfconscious 20-something maybe you can communicate entirely through selfies on instagram or videos on YouTube. If you… OK I can’t think of anything that would make you use Google+. Anyway, you get the point. Options, baby. Start with the ones you don’t feel so awkward about and eventually start sidling up to the others and mumbling pleasantries. Alcohol might help.** Talk to people – comment on their posts, answer their questions, slowly start inserting yourself into discussions so you don’t have the pressure of showing up to the party and just shouting things in the corner til the nice man with the bow tie and vest asks you if you need a taxi.

I mean look at this – I’ve managed to keep this post down to a manageable length! Progress, yeah?

Happy social media-ing, guys.

Important addendum: It is possible that you actually are terrible at this. Like, you can’t get online without insulting people, being constantly inflammatory, trolling, spreading hateful messages or just otherwise being a all-purposes jerk. If this is the case, almost certainly because you are in fact a horrible person and you’re not even capable of masking how horrible you are for your own self interest, then please, stay offline. It will only hurt you.

* Skills I have failed to acquire despite repeating the activity over and over include ‘being able to read news articles without reading the comments’; ‘singing’; ‘being able to read the comments without getting angry’; ‘walking while swallowing’.

** Or it might really not. I tend to think things are a lot funnier than they are with a glass of wine in hand, and then all of a sudden I’m live tweeting a TV show that aired approximately 10 years ago. And being really overly interested in how comfortable the armchairs in the show look (just in case there had been any previous implication that I had any semblance of cool***).

*** If you haven’t yet picked up on this, I do not in fact have any semblance of cool.

This is the fourth in a 5 part series debunking your excuses (and mine) for avoiding social media. Part 1 (But no-one’s reading it!) is here; Part 2 (But I don’t have anything of value to say!) is here and Part 3 (But I don’t have time!) is here.

4. But what’s in it for me?

We covered already how you probably don’t have loads of extra time you’re desperate to fill with 140 character witticisms. And you grudgingly agreed you could make the time if you needed to. But maybe you’re still wondering if it’s worth finding the time to do it; i.e. what do you really get out of this?

Well, I mean, first of all it’s fun. (Maybe a little too fun at times.) I’d be surprised if you didn’t get some personal value out of participating. Case in point: I had dinner with Robin Hobb this week.* Robin Hobb has been my favourite author, and total writing idol, for the better part of two decades, and my two sisters and I took her out to dinner on Tuesday – just the four of us. I’ll just sit here for a while and enjoy having been able to type that sentence. *basks* Thanks to social media I have gotten to know my favourite writer and now have an actual relationship with her (even a friendship, privileged as I am to say it). Through social media you can make new friends, learn new things, see different perspectives, enjoy new and creative ways to make fun of Christopher Pyne. There are a lot of upsides in it for you personally.

But it’s also got major upsides for you as a writer.

Ultimately, like my son’s nappy, like so much in life, what you get out of it depends what you put in. I said before social media is about communication, and it is. As an author, as I see it, this boils down to two key things social media can do for your career:**

1. Connecting and building relationships with your readers

One of the greatest things about the modern age, in my view, is this amazing opportunity we have to connect with people. You like someone’s work? You can tell them, quickly, succinctly, that you like it. Maybe you can have a conversation with them. Learn more about them and their work. Worm your way into their affections by sending them cute wombat pictures. What? No, not that one.***

If you’re a writer, this works for you. You share a part of yourself on social media and it gives readers of your work a chance to build a connection with you – a relationship, of sorts – which is satisfying for them and can make really loyal fans out of your readers. A reader who has a personal connection with you is more likely to be the type of reader who will buy your books on the day they come out, review them, recommend them and lend them to friends. And – spoiler alert! – those are the very best kinds of readers to have.

2. Helping you reach new readers

The other cool thing it can do for you – if you’re good at it (and that’s the subject of the next and final post) – is help you reach new readers. Another case in point: since I joined twitter and started participating in the last couple of month, I’ve found at least half a dozen new writers who are funny and/or interesting or otherwise engaging on twitter and become fans of their work. In a couple of cases I’ve bought their whole back catalogue. I found Chuck Wendig because of his awesome, hilarious and surprisingly wise blog on writing (if you don’t follow it, you should: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/blog/ unless you’re easily offended by swearing, in which case you shouldn’t, and also you should probably try to not be offended by stuff so much). I’ve read books I’ve adored in genres I don’t usually enjoy because friends have posted Goodreads reviews on FB. All in all, over the course of this year and solely because of social media, I’ve bought more new books and tried more new authors than probably the last three or four years combined. If you’re active on social media and you build relationships there, you might find yourself reaching people who would never have seen your book in a bookshelf or had a reason to pick you out of a crowd.

In summary: there’s plenty to like about social media, so stop thinking about it in terms of something you have to do because you think publishers or agents want or expect or demand it (i.e. an annoying chore) and start thinking about it as a way to better communicate and connect with other readers & writers which will help your book reach more people.

Next time (the last instalment, I promise), But I’m no good at it! In which I opine that if you put in a bit of effort, it’s not that hard to be decent at using social media, unless you have absolutely no redeeming personality traits and are incapable of faking them (in which case, maybe a job based entirely on communicating with people isn’t actually your ideal career).

* If you don’t know who Robin Hobb is, go read her immediately. IMMEDIATELY. What are you still doing here? You’ve got like 17 books to get through, minimum, and we already covered how busy you are.

** You will note that neither of these things is the ability to spam people and shove your book down their virtual throats like a foul tasting virtual book-gag that smells like socks and desperation. Don’t do that.

*** Sidebar: Just saw a tweet from an author asking that people not send her emails with pictures of their dong. I didn’t think this needed saying, but maybe it does: for fuck’s sake don’t send pictures of your dong – or your ladybits, whatever – to strangers. Even strangers who wrote books you like. Or, indeed, to anyone who hasn’t expressly asked for it. I cannot stress this enough.

This is the third in a 5 part series whereby I try to persuade you (and me) that all this social media stuff is worth your time. Part 1 (But no-one’s reading it!) is here; Part 2 (But I don’t have anything of value to say!) is here.

3. But I don’t have time!

I get it. You’re busy. I’m busy. I have a spouse and 2 children under 4. A difficult job in a demanding profession. 2 dogs who need walking and playing and bum-scratching.* A garden with things in I’d like to eat before the snails do. A house that does not magically clean itself no matter how many variations of Harry Potter style Latinesque I throw at it. Judo and boxing and a deep love of food and wine. More books in my must-read pile than I can ever whittle down. Fingernails that grow creepily fast and necessitate cutting all the freaking time like I’m some kind of monstrous X-Files villain. You get the picture. It’s hard enough to fit in writing time without having to worry about all this annoying social media stuff, amIright?

Well, suck it up, pumpkin. You want this to be your career, don’t you? So treat it seriously and make the time. You made the time to write a book and God knows I know it can be hard to scrounge the time you need to do it. But you made it. You did that, you can do this.

By which I mean, find bits of time to do it regularly. Not hours and hours (as if you have any of those, right?) but little bits of time, often. Social media is social. That’s kind of the point. You can’t go to a party once a year then expect everyone there to remember you.** You might as well not bother – if you’re not going to do it regularly, don’t bother. Just stay at home and watch Game of Thrones.

Don’t get me wrong, you can ignore this aspect if you want. In the same way that you can open a cafe and serve coffee but not offer any food at all (not even a little biscuit or chocolate with the coffee, you cheap bastard) if you want to. And maybe you’ll be successful in your beverage-only venture. It’s just that, possibly, if you put a lot of care and precision and attention and flair into your coffee-making, maybe your patrons would be keen to also sample some food you make; say, a friand, or a salted caramel tart, or would it kill you to try your hand at a bacon and egg roll? Sure, it’s not precisely the same skill set, but if you can learn to make a great cup of coffee you can probably learn to make toast too.*** Novels are different from blogs and tweets and facebook posts. But they’re all words. If you’re a great writer (and you are, right?) then you can probably make more than one kind of content that people enjoy reading.

Sidebar: but what if you really can’t cook? Then it’s OK to stick to making coffee. It’s not a crime. People need coffee, and they can get food elsewhere if they want it. See more on this in Part 5: But I’m really bad at it.

Anyway, you don’t have to do any of this social media stuff. No-one will arrest you. People will still read your book. On the other hand, why not use every tool at your disposal to reach and connect with readers? If you’re serious about writing as a career, if you want to earn money from it, then don’t hobble yourself by ignoring part of the business.

Just like anything else, if it’s important, you make time for it. You don’t need to be tweeting in the shower or giving up date night with your partner or otherwise destroying your life so that you can be on facebook 24/7. But you need to devote some time to it because it’s part of the business.

To summarise: I know it’s hard, but everyone else is in the same boat. It’s one big smelly boat where no-one showers as much as you’d like. Deal with it and find little pieces of time on a regular basis, and you’ll be fine.

*That’s not a typo. That’s Brown Dog’s preferred form of affection.

** Unless you’re that guy. You know, the one you remember for the wrong reasons. The guy who took off his pants or the Tony Robbins addict who loudly and drunkenly demanded of everyone at the party ‘but what are your life goals?’ Get on twitter occasionally and be an arsehole, and people will remember you, just not the way you want.

*** A place where I regularly get coffee after the gym calls its toast on the menu, I am not kidding, ‘cooked bread’. That makes me want to punch the cafe in the face. Don’t call your toast cooked bread, OK?

This is the second in a 5 part series on why your excuses for not doing social media (and they’ve been mine as well) are crap. Part one (But no-one’s reading it!) is here.

2. But I don’t have anything of value to say!

You’re talking to the person who just spent the last entry babbling out Simpsons references and inadvertent endorsements of the logging industry? Value-schmalue.

I was recently privileged enough to be part of Hardcopy, the ACT Writers’ Centre’s excellent professional development program for emerging novelists. Among other great presentations, we had a half day devoted to marketing, promotion and social media, including getting some valuable time with the awesome Eva Bui from Penguin taking us through the ins and outs of navigating social media. And there ended up being a rather vigorous discussion among the cohort about the necessity for, and value of, social media for writers.

Some people in the room viewed the prospect of starting a social media presence with approximately the same level of enthusiasm I observed in the sullen teenager cleaning up vomit in a Woolworths aisle last week. Twit-ter…? Visible carrot in the spew. Faaaaaaacebook? Instawhat? Someone can’t digest corn.

And I do sympathise. Until now I’ve never had any settings broader than ‘friends only’ so the idea of sharing my – let’s face it, essentially pointless – rambling with the public* is a bit alien. But as I mentioned last time, there’s an inherent optimism in being a writer. You wrote a book you thought other people might like. Is it too much of a stretch that they might like other stuff too? That they might even enjoy learning something about you?

Social media is about being social. Talking to people. That’s the whole point. Are you concerned about whether every word you say to your friends or colleagues or people you just met is important enough? Are you worried when you walk away that you’ve just somehow offered up worthless trash just because you talked about a movie you liked or the fact that your neighbour smells like cat even though she doesn’t have one or a funny story you heard? Are you judging other people you meet based on that standard too? I bet you’re not. So don’t worry too much about contributing to the great pool of literature via your Facebook page and instead think of it as it is: a way to communicate with people.

There’s no point obsessing over whether you have anything ‘worthy’ to contribute, whatever that means. You have yourself, and whatever slice of yourself you choose to offer. (Hint: make it the most entertaining, kindest, best version of yourself that you can manage**). If you can’t see that you have any value then you have bigger problems than I’m going to solve in a blog post.

You can offer something to your fans. What exactly that comprises is up to you. It might be insight into your writing process. It might be extra little details about your stories or background facts about the characters or settings. It might be your kickass recipes or your funny anecdotes about your dog or your cat-smelling neighbour,*** or sharing experiences about publishing. Maybe you are funny or interesting or kind or ALL THREE.

Besides, you’ll get better over time. I’m counting on it.

To summarise: This isn’t your entry for the Man Booker. It’s just you talking to people – maybe your fans, maybe people you’re fans OF. Don’t stress out about it.

Next time: But I don’t have time! (in which you assure me that you already have to write your novel in a series of scribbles on tablecloths while working in a restaurant or through memorising interpretive dances representing your story at the gym, so how are you bloody well going to find the time to post cat pictures on facebook as well?)

* In theory. I’m quite aware that at the time of writing, not even my mother is reading this (But she’ll catch up once she knows it’s here. Hi, Mum).

** By which I don’t mean you have to obsess over content and form all the time. Clearly, this blog is going to be a rambling collection of my thoughts, written and set out the way I talk with my friends and family, not the way I’d write a novel or a piece of business correspondence. I’m not going to edit it like my fiction so that there are no misplaced words or clunky phrases. Be genuine – but obviously be conscious that what you’re putting out there will stay out there potentially forever, so a bit of censoring yourself is OK also. Don’t be a dick, obviously.

*** My neighbour does not smell like cats. But since I used the example I can’t stop thinking about solving that fictional enigma.