Add your voice to the sound of the crowd

Three articles on authors and social media. From last year, Daniel Kalder writes about why authors should and shouldn't use social media:

Social media are great enablers of the magical thinking that afflicts authors and publishers alike. What do I mean? Well, consider the following essential truths about publishing: crap sells, except when it doesn't. Quality never sells, except when it does. Good men die screaming in the gutter; the wicked flourish. To quote William Goldman: nobody knows anything. Given that we live in a state of total chaos, it is only natural that individuals study the chicken's entrails for guidance. What's that spelled out in the guts? Blogging! Facebook! Awesome! What could go wrong? Blogging is free, plus you can subvert the hierarchical media model and go direct to your readers. Wait for it, but here comes the magical thinking: Hey ma, lookit me! Any minute now I'm going to go viral and everybody's going to buy my book!

It's not only authors who entertain such dreams. Publishers do too. Actually, chances are that if you do write something that goes viral, it'll be the blog itself, not your name or your book. People will read your masterpiece and a few seconds later click a link taking them to a Brazilian baby with amazing samba moves. Blink once, twice, your "viral" blog is forgotten. Believe otherwise and you are in for mucho disappointment.

Resist magical thinking.

Full article is here.

More recently, Anis Shivani suggests shunning it all:

These "rules" totally go against every prescription for writing success you'll hear as a young writer from all quarters: the conformity-driven MFA system, the publishing industry's hype-machine, successful writers who act either like prima donnas or untouchable mystics, the marketing experts who seek to impose advertising rules on the writing product. Overpaid editors, illiterate agents, arrogant gatekeepers, and stupid reviewers want you to bargain away your soul for a pittance -- the bids in the market escalate downward, a reverse auction where you compete with the lowest of the low to be acknowledged as an entity that counts.

Full article is here. (Tip of the hat to Crime Watch.)

And from Cory Doctorow a report on what happens when the new model backfires:

Six years ago, Diane Duane started to ask her readers if they'd be willing to subsidize her next book through subscriptions as she wrote it. Things went great for a while, and then they didn't. Diane's health, circumstances, and life went through a long, bumpy patch and her book went off the rails.

Now she's finished it, and put it online with a long and heartfelt apology to the readers who'd backed her.

This is an important -- and underreported -- problem with "micropatronage" and "street performer protocol"-style artistic experiments. Writers are often late with their books. Sometimes they're so late that the books are given up for dead. [...]

This is normal, and we know how to deal with it in the world of traditional publishing. But in the world of public writing-as-performance where there are hundreds or possibly thousands of people with a financial stake in the book -- people who aren't editors at a house with 400 books under contract, but rather people who've never been around a book during its creation -- it gets really difficult and sticky.

Full article here.