I've been trying desperately to establish an author platform for a while now. From pretty much... every source I've read or seen on bringing yourself some traffic, there seems to be a need for a kind of regular content relating to your actual label.
Given that I have an end goal of getting published to a larger audience, I'm trying to, of course, attract attention. But not the attention of just anyone, I mean the attention of people who would be likely to buy and read a book in the first place. And, as I've heard, the best way to start is social media. Of course! Why wouldn't it be? People are constantly on social media, and have been for years. So, for years of neglecting the lifestyle, I hopped on to try and whore out advertise myself.
My first foray into the game was a Twitter page, which can be found here. For its credit, it did attract a decent amount of attention at first, and I don't tend to lose followers (like SOME platform I can think of). But it's also not like anyone else has been following, or even so much as liking my tweets. This is alright. None of my tweets actually need to be liked, or seen, nor do I really need to be followed - but there's definitely some importance on being "out there" for the beginning of a career. A part of it may be the first strategy, which was shallowly following hashtags -- those got... some attention, and they still do if I post in writing hashtags, but not the kind of stuff I needed.
Then it was Facebook. This is a more personal web space (I guess), and it's only been a way to connect with family and friends. Obvious, obvious, but just in case, I keep my profile public and post all of my Instagram photos there just in case
Next, I tried YouTube. Please don't make me talk about that.
When that didn't work so well (I didn't try very hard, but I quickly realized that I hated everything that had to do with video creation) I went to Instagram. Now, Instagram happened to be the best platform for things I enjoyed making, which was amateur book photography. I don't pretend like any of those pictures are any more than a quick setup with a book and my phone, but despite their nonprofessional appearance, I happen to like creating them quite a bit. And I won't lie, I've gotten a teensy bit of traffic from most of them. But what hurts a bit every time I post one is the amount of people that actually like them is made up of people I know, not people looking to find an interesting new photo of a book (and possibly following as a consequence, and one day seeing news of my newly published story). Not to mention the types that tend to follow are accounts that just want others to follow them, and leave if you don't.
But the largest issue with this is that, despite the pictures not being top tier pieces of art, they take time to plan, money to create (with props and whatnot, let alone buying the book), and they demand locations -- locations that I'm running out of. Plus, with my measly traffic, I am not going to go driving out everywhere further than two or three miles for some silly phone photograph.
So here's the gist. Content from creators has to be "meaningful," but what is "meaningful" in the first place?
Pretty much all that I can offer (for the time being) from social media can be found better in other places, but this won't be true forever. I do not, by any means, see this blog attracting any attention at all, and that is also okay. It's mainly for me right now, to have an excuse to write a few times a month about things without a limited scope. After all, on sites like Goodreads, IMDB, etc., the type of writing published has exclusively to do with reviews. This is a given, and it's not like I don't enjoy writing a good review here and there, but is it "meaningful" to anyone but me? That is the million dollar question.
