Jessica Scott

Have you ever posted pictures of your children on Facebook? Did you know that once you post anything to Facebook, they own it and can use it in advertising if they wish?

Or how about this. Google yourself in the white pages. I was highly disturbed today to find that not only was my name and phone number listed, but my exact physical address was also posted. For anyone who wishes to find me, my address was just a key stroke away.

Color me a little freaked out. In the age of cyberspace and especially for a public figure like an author (or in my case an aspiring one) the fact that anyone could Google me and come up with not only my address but my husband’s name and my phone number was incredibly disturbing.

While social networking is critical for the success of any author in this day and age, it also means that authors have to be selective about what information they do allow. NY Times Bestselling author Julia London has tweeted about received emails from prison inmates asking her to write their story. But what if that same content came by way of the regular mail?

It is all to easy to find someone these days. Be cautious about how much information you do choose to put on Facebook. If you own a domain name, if you did not register the account privately, your address and contact information is easily available in the WhoIs database.

I’m not writing this to scare you or to urge you to get offline. Doing so would damage potential future sales. In the online social networked world, readers expect to connect with their favorite authors. But be cautious. The internet is full of people pretending to be someone they are not.

Recommendations: when you register your domain name, register it privately. GoDaddy charges extra for this privilege but I have done so with every domain name I’ve bought. Google yourself in the white pages and then sign in to edit your publicly available settings. You can remove the listing easily enough so that only your name and city are available.

Once you do that, look at who you have for friends on Facebook and MySpace. Do you know them? All of them? If not, do you really want to share baby pictures with random strangers? Check out your followers on Twitter. It seems like every week there is a new hacking attempt at violating your account. Only click on links you know, which is often difficult because of URL shortening services that are so commonly used.

From snopes.com “Facebook users can prevent their profile photos from appearing in association with social ads by selecting the following options:
Settings –> Privacy –> Facebook Ads (tab) –> Appearance in Facebook ads (pull-down menu) –> Set to “No one”"

The online world is full of dark corners most of us cannot imagine. It doesn’t take much for those corners to extend into our own social networks. Use caution with the information you put online and if you’re disconcerted, take action to hide yourself. In today’s day and age, it’s still incredibly easy to find information on people but you can make it just a tad more difficult by practicing some common sense.

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People think of Twitter as that little bird icon on people’s websites or a small blue T but if you don’t use it, you might be confused as to what it is. For an author, it can be a crucial tool or make you look like one.

Think of Twitter as a stream. If you have an account, you’re at least standing on the side of it. If you pop in periodically to announce that you’ve done this or that, you are, at best, standing on the shore, throwing rocks into it. This is not a way for you to gain followers or to fully exploit that which Twitter is.

To maximize your social networking time, you need to fully dive into the Twitter stream and that means entering the conversation. How do you find people to follow? I went to people I knew of, such as @Smartbitches and @deirdreknight to see who they were following. I looked for people who were industry folks, not friends of theirs, though in some cases they were probably the same and I followed them. Then I repeated the same for other folks, expanding the network of people who I follow. It’s a wide web but when someone, say, @laurakinsale followed me, I about fell out of my chair. It’s a small thing, but it’s pretty cool from a fangirl perspective.

Twitter etiquette is that is someone follows you, you should follow them back. I don’t auto follow. There are also bots out there that auto follow everyone then you somehow end up tweeting blow job links to little kids in Brazil, which is Not. Cool. Or legal but that’s another discussion. So you have to watch your followers and block the spammers (though for the life of me, I can’t figure out why people twitter spam).

Once you have a list of folks you follow, pay attention. Read it. Yes, this is a time suck, which is why I do not have a twitter client installed on my laptop. I only use Twitter on my iPhone because when I sit down to work, it’s time to work and keeping it on my iPhone is one way of keeping my usage under control. Though I’m approaching 4000 tweets so whether it’s in control or not is up for discussion.

But Twitter isn’t always about me and if you’re on it, you know the authors who only show up to promote their book. This is not a good way to maximize your time because you’re only having one part of the conversation. The part about you. After a while, people will stop listening. Some authors have huge fan bases and people will follow regardless. But to truly have impact, you have to converse and that means retweeting. The Retweet means that you take someone else’s tweet about them or something other than you and pass it along. I routinely look for my fav author’s stuff and pass them along. If I see someone say something great about a book I enjoyed, I pass it along. Same goes with good news. Make Twitter about the stream and the people around you and people will notice and follow you.

That’s not to say that I don’t have my wordpress blog set up to automatically tweet when I have a new post. You still have to tell people your good news and hope they’ll pass it along. It goes a long way if you’ve done the same for others in the past. I try to maximize the social networking time I do have and so I have almost everything tied in together, so my blog and twitter both feed to facebook.  Which is another drawback to Twitter. If you feed into your facebook, you still need to take care of that page, too. But that will be part 3.

Being social means talking about other than yourself. Follow people and they will follow you back. Or maybe not. I don’t unfollow people who don’t follow me because then I miss out on what they’re saying and then I’d be missing part of the conversation.

And the conversation works because once more, I look for common tweeters. Fellow twitter users have entered onto my keeper book shelf because I discovered their stuff through twitter and I might not have learned about them otherwise. But it’s about the conversation. About getting in and making about something other than yourself. And if you’re not on twitter in the conversation, you may be missing the point.

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Ah, yes. Why else would editors and agents tell authors to get a web page even before they begin querying? Why else would it be one of the first things that publicity departments tell authors with books coming out?

But the biggest reason social networking works is because of: me.

Not me, me. You, me. The millions of me’s out on the net, cruising facebook and twitter and myspace. Maybe you learned about a new author from a friend’s recommendation on facebook. Maybe you see an author’s comments on Twitter.

But when I was walking through the bookstore yesterday, I was busy scanning for author’s names I knew. Authors I hadn’t even heard of before I hopped on line and decided to reach out to the writing world. Authors who would have been another name on the shelf now stand out to me. I turn books of authors I know, of books I love so that the cover is facing forward.

There is also an aspect of loyalty. Authors who have sent care packages and school supplies to Iraq, I remember. I look for their names.

The name is what matters. The author behind it and the books the author is hoping you’ll buy. This book or that will come and go, but building a brand is what social networking is all about. Building a name so that when a million other me’s go to the bookstore, your name is what they’re looking for, either consciously or unconsciously. When they see it, there will be a flash of recognition, followed maybe by a flash of a purchase.

But social networking works. It creates online word of mouth but it creates something more: name recognition. Maybe you’ve exchanged tweets with an author. Maybe you simply commented on someone’s facebook wall because they were having the same kind of day you were.

But social networking works.

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