HERE AT waynekspear.com, I lift the curtain from time to time to disclose my thoughts on the writing life as they apply to this website. As with any public undertaking, there’s much going on behind the scenes at this word factory of mine. Today I’m considering the marketing of a writer, and how poor I am at – and why I think I continue, as a matter of principle, to be poor at it.
IN THE LATEST Roundtable Toronto Podcast, episode 65, Mandy, Greg, Andy and I discussed the social media. We talked about who was using what, how the respective media differ, and the contrasting uses and limitations of each. The consensus at the table, so far as I could infer one, was that some media are more social than others: if you’re looking for engagement and conversation, you’ve found that media are not created alike.
I‘VE BEEN AT WORDPRESS for fifty-one months now, and I’ve posted 550 entries. Just for the heck of it, I’ve spent several weeks studying the data I’ve collected from the WordPress “dashboard” as well as from other sources. I drilled down into the data, as you kids like to say, until I hit oil. Now I’m rich, so screw you. This will be my last entry.
Kidding!
I WAS ASKED the other day who I imagined my ideal reader to be. “Well,” I answered – “I hadn’t really thought about that.” Not exactly a stellar reply, I know. Of course I had a half-formed, all-wispy-like inkling of my readers. Tween girls, not on the list. Marxist-Leninists? Not so much. The Nobel Literature Prize Review Board and the editors of Vanity Fair? Hell yes … one day. Well, now I’m curious – just who is my IDEAL reader?
IN MANY RESPECTS, Garnet Angeconeb is representative of the countless Aboriginal children beaten and raped in Canada’s Indian residential schools. For years he told no one, including his wife. Angry, pain-filled and confused, he drank heavily to dull his feelings. The turning-point in his life arrived during a business trip to Ottawa, on October 31, 1990:
THERE’S NO USE in a writer denying the pleasures derived of notoriety, but it happened this week that I was “Freshly Pressed” and that I had feelings about it which weren’t entirely comforting. In case you don’t know, to be Freshly Pressed (or FPd, as I have discovered the WordPress folks put it) is to have a post chosen by the editors of WordPress for the landing page at wordpress.com. This arbitrary distinction — as I feel it to be — brings with it a huge momentary increase in traffic, comments, email and polite approbation. In short, here comes and goes your fifteen minutes of fame.
Were you to find me by chance at the local pub, I’d be in the dark corner with a scotch and, at most, two or three friends. This may seem an odd way to begin an article headlined in part by the phrase Social Media. The point is I’m not much a practitioner of the social. I don’t “do” small talk well, I don’t care for crowds, and rarely do I think my personal life (which in any case is no one’s damn business) of interest to my interlocutors. So it may seem a contradiction to you that I have had accounts at MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and other such social media websites. I know of people more anti-social than I who can say the same. What is it that draws us, the sub-social, to these improbable places? Continue reading Scrapping The Social Media
ALTHOUGH I KNEW at a young age that I should be a writer, little else would be sorted out until many years later, and then often by accident. When I was a child, say, ten to thirteen years old, I had only vague ideas about what a writer even was. I suppose I imagined a cold and dark room and a gaunt person at a desk, producing poems and novels, posting them to publishers who would promptly send back letters which read Thank-you, but no thank-you. In time I would have a more informed picture of a writer’s existence, having learned that publishers in fact do not send these letters, or any other, promptly.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 