Category: social media

As an author, I’m constantly looking for ways to get the word out about my work and to engage with readers and other authors. And one part of my strategy is social media.

Before social media, there were blogs. Long before I was a published author, I started blogging. I first start blogging using a wiki, then switched to Drupal. I maintained a blog at Esperanto-USA while I was webmaster there. Many people used blogs primarily to link to and comment on the other things they were reading.

Most people didn’t have the technical chops or resources to set up their own blogging environment, so they chose a site managed by a third party. Typically, these were offered “free” in a limited form as a kind of loss-leader supported by venture capitalists trying to make a bet on what the “next big thing” was going to be.

One of the most popular with authors was Livejournal. I wasn’t a published author in those days, but I was aware of the robust author community there. But when Livejournal was purchased by the Russian state and began to censor and persecute users, most of the writer community abandoned it.

This was around the time people began to use microblogging platforms that became what people collectively termed “social media”. The most popular with authors was probably Twitter, which I’ve written about elsewhere. As I took my first steps into the author community, it was great to have a place where the other authors were active: sharing perspectives and supporting one another. And occasionally quarreling.

I predicted that when Twitter became a Nazi bar, the community would move somewhere else. I was hopeful that they would settle on Mastodon. With Livejournal getting purchased by a repressive regime and then Twitter getting purchased by a narcissistic billionaire, I thought maybe they would have learned something. Unfortunately, it appears that the largest part of the active author community has settled at Blue Sky where they are once again suckling on the teat of venture capital.

But there is no longer a clear center. Blue Sky seems to have more of the established authors. But the largest microblogging community may well be Threads. And Facebook and Instagram are still the largest overall communities, though young people are more likely to be on Tiktok or Discord.

So it’s not at all clear which community is the best to focus on. I’m still guided by a presentation about book promotion I attended a couple of years ago that said, “Don’t pressure yourself to do it all.” I like the community at Mastodon. So that’s where I spend the most time. And I forward a few of my more announcement-like posts at Blue Sky and Facebook. And then I call it a day. Because, in the end, I would rather spend my time writing new fiction.

Early in my fiction writing, I really struggled with writing “stories.” By that, I mean using a narrative structure that presents a problem which is satisfactorily resolved — ideally well-paced, with rising action that climaxes at the right moment. I tended to write a rambling narrative of vaguely interesting events that raised all kinds of problems but did not resolve them satisfactorily.

Sometime — perhaps in early 2022, which is the first example I can find without visiting birdchan — I discovered #vss365: a hashtag prompt for which participants were encouraged to write a very short story (vss) that would be offered each day of the year (365) contained in a single, brief post. Baring my soul, typo and all, here is the first one I have recorded, from Feb 11, 2022:

She visited the garden center when she was depressed. The flowers didn’t cheer her up, exactly, but they helped her remember that better times might come. The annuals were too gaudy for her. She always loved tge reliability of the #perennial that would keep blooming in the years to come. Now that was something to live for.

It’s a story! She’s depressed. She visits the garden center. The perennials give her something to live for.

I found writing a brief post was something I could do, even during the academic year when I was working full time. It reminds me a bit of when I started writing haiku in Esperanto while I was a grad student and no longer had time for anything more. But it was enough.

I enjoyed #vss365 and I have hundreds of examples of brief story fragments I wrote. Some served as the nucleus of a story. And some I would string together, writing a whole rough draft one bit at a time.

But then a narcissistic billionaire purchased birdchan, turned it into a Nazi bar, and I couldn’t bear to visit the Nazi bar anymore to get the prompts. But someone had created a website that would scrape the prompt and share it on the open web. So I started participating even though I had jumped to Mastodon (first to mastodon.lol and then to wandering.shop). But then the site shut down: they where having to pay the narcissistic billionaire money to scrape a single word each day from birdchan. And he finally, perfectly sensibly, decided to quit paying.

So I wrote my last two posts on Dec 31, 2023 and commented that I wouldn’t be participating anymore. A friend, @asakiyume, suggested that we could start our own prompt game on Mastodon. I roped my brother, @philipbrewer into the conversation and we agreed to pick some words, favoring simple ordinary words with more than one meaning. (I had found it annoying to have words that had only a single meaning as being overly restrictive of the kind of post you could write.)

But then Phil suggested that maybe we should create an account to be an authoritative source for the prompt. As I thought about it, I realized that we also wanted a bot: something that didn’t need to be shared, but could be configured easily and contrived to post automatically at a particular time. So I investigating creating a bot for Mastodon.

This is not the first time I’ve done something like this: years ago, I created a bot for birdchan called “dupolusulo” that would randomly post either a proverb from the Esperanta Proverbaro or string of plausible text generated by a baysian algorithm that used the Proverbaro as a corpus. This plausible text was often utterly incomprehsible, but looked like it might mean something and sounded a lot like the proverbaro.

This time was pretty similar, though easier. I wrote a little python script that would figure out what day of the year it was, read in a CSV file, and grab a line matching the day number, parse it, and emit it as a formatted text string. Then, all I had to do was set up a Mastodon account, @wss366 configured to allow a bot to post to it. To be honest, what sold me on the whole thing was when I discovered that I sorta kinda personally know the guy who runs the botsin.space instance that was set up to support these kinds of bots.

It took me about a day to set up the Mastodon account, configure it, create an avatar, add a header graphic, write the script, configure a cron job to call it at 5am. But by the end of the day, I posted an announcement that the post was live and would post to #wss366 (for Wandering Shop Stories and 366 because it’s a leap year this year) was live.

This morning, it posted its first prompt: #brick.

I can’t wait to see what it’s going to post tomorrow. Now that’s something to live for.

twitter logo

I joined Twitter in March 2008 and, after initially puzzling about what it was for, found it to be an amazing place. I particularly appreciated the focus on text, rather than copypasta pictures that seemed to dominate most of the other social media environments. I loved the requirement to be concise. I enjoyed taking the time to carefully craft a complete thought in 140 characters.

But it was also who else was there. Authors, scientists, journalists, historians. It was like a 24-hour cocktail party — especially when events were happening. It was also where you could call out a corporation and they would immediately respond to head off having your issue go viral.

And I used the Twitter API for a number of projects. I had created a twitter bot that could post Esperanto quotes. I had set up system to capture my tweets and save them at my website. I had a block on the front page of my blog to show my tweets. I frequently embedded tweets to support posts I was writing. I had set up Discord bots to gateway tweets for my publisher.

When I became a published author, my publisher encouraged me to create a separate social-media account for my publishing work, and so I created a new twitter handle and began developing a readership focused primarily on science fiction, fantasy, and publishing.

On Oct 27, the purchase of Twitter was completed. And, unlike some who immediately bailed, I thought I would wait and watch for a bit. But it didn’t take long to perceive what the new owner was going to do. And so, I began looking for alternatives.

I had actually created a Mastodon account in June, 2019: @limako@esperanto.masto.host. I was very much in favor of the idea and the model. (And, actually, I also had created another account for an instance created by a student.) But most of the people I was interested in interacting with just weren’t there. So I’d logged in a handful of times, but had not spent much time there.

On Nov 10, I created a new Mastodon account and began to wean myself away from Twitter. This was during a huge exodus and the entire fediverse was straining to accommodate so many new users. I could see that wandering.shop was probably the best instance for SFF authors, but I couldn’t get an invite code. And, rather than waiting patiently, I decided to create an account at another instance that seemed interesting: mastodon.lol: “A Mastodon server friendly towards anti-fascists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, hackers, and the like.”

It was a rather heady time, with vast numbers of new people trying to figure out this different thing. The guy who ran mastodon.lol was adding capacity like mad to accommodate all the people looking for new accounts. It went from 8000 to nearly 80,000 users in just a few months. He set up a patreon and people contributed money such that, in short order, it was financially self-supporting. But he quickly decided that trying to run such a service on his own wasn’t any fun. He never said exactly what happened — at least not that I ever saw — but he evidently became disillusioned and, by February, had flamed out. He posted a bitter message that the service would be shutting down in a few months. And then he vanished.

By this point, I was easily able to get an invite code for wandering.shop and, on February 9, 2023, I migrated my account to @stevendbrewer@wandering.shop.

For a while, my publisher had encouraged me to continue to post book promotion tweets at Twitter. And I did so until Jun 21, 2023, when the owner of Twitter asserted that “cis” and “cisgender” were slurs and would result in people saying them being suspended. This was a bright line for me and I informed my publisher that I would no longer be posting at Twitter. He indicated that this was fine.

By this point, I had largely finished grieving. I was already no longer visiting Twitter. But it was sad to watch all of the cool services around the Internet that had depended on Twitter gradually vanish. The block on my blog quite working. The bots for my publisher quit working.

Every so often, I would see another high profile defection as people gave up and grieved what they had lost. I still feel some pain, like a phantom limb. I like the new community at Mastodon. But it’s not the same.

It’s still astonishing to me how many people are still ostensibly there.

Even more astonishing to me are the people who, after watching their whole online world purchased and set alight to satisfy the ego of an unbalanced lunatic, are migrating to other commercial properties, like Bluesky or Threads. Did you learn nothing? Sigh…

The Third Time’s the Charm Support Graphic

In my previous post about publishing with Water Dragon I mentioned the “support, encouragement, and advice” that authors get with publicity. About a week before the release of the story, I got a link to download some graphics. The folder included the electronic, print, and trade covers plus versions of the cover art carefully composed and resized for my desktop (as “wallpaper”); for my website; and for header graphics for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Creating these kinds of graphics are not necessarily difficult for me. I created my own covers for my self-published books. (And I’m rather proud of the covers I created.) But that stuff all takes time and, without access to the the original files, it wouldn’t be feasible to create re-composed versions at all. But, in the end, it’s just one fewer thing I need to do myself: I can just use them and spend more time publicizing. (Or writing!)

In point of fact, authors frequently don’t get consulted about their cover art at all. Nancy Wood wrote about how discouraging it was to get a horrible cover when working with a different publisher and how the magic of a compelling cover can make all the difference. Look at that cover! I mean… just look at it.

For my cover, with Water Dragon and the amazing artist Niki Lenhart, we went through about three iterations. The first design was similar to the final design, but I had some suggestions about the nature of the ship that was presented. In the second, I noticed a few additional details to correct. But I was also presented with an alternative design to consider. I liked it — and it was compelling in a certain way — but jointly, with the editor, we decided that the original design was more eye-catching. Then I got one last chance to see it before we pulled the trigger and approved it.

In addition, authors also receive postcards and business cards to support their publicity efforts. The postcards can be used to provide a “signed” version of the digital edition. But, for a story that only sells for $0.99, sending a postcard for $0.40 postage doesn’t make much economic sense. And business cards are more useful during times when people are actually meeting face to face. (I guess I could hold one up to my Zoom camera…)

In addition to material support, Water Dragon and the supportive community of writers working with them have had a wealth of ideas and advice for how to get the word out about one’s writing. It’s provided almost a template for how to get set up to publicize effectively — and to share information about events that might provide opportunities to offer a reading or get books in front of people.

I don’t have (m)any illusions that my first short story will catch fire and take over the internet. But I have to admit that as a debut, this experience has been amazing: My story has been published on its own, with its own cover and identity, rather than part of a collection. It’s been a great trial run for writing a longer piece of fiction (and I have several in the pipeline). And Ive learned a huge amount about the process and established a foundation (blog, twitter feed, website, etc.) to support my writing going forward. Thanks, Water Dragon!

(PS: You too can submit to Dragon Gems!)