The news about Facebook’s embroilment in a data-harvesting-cum-political scandal kind of makes us all want to unfriend the platform for good.

For sure, our collective conscience would be cleaner and we’d all be a lot less distracted without it. Some of us would probably even feel a vengeful twinge of self-righteousness seeing Zuckerberg and his cohorts caught at last with the smoking gun that proves their invention is not only bad for us, but just downright bad.

While a breakup with Facebook might inflict some short-term suffering on most folks — pain from the loss of online friendships and a hollow void in that space between minutes that status updates used to fill — for writers and authors, it would pose a nearly existential dilemma.

For better or for worse, Facebook is still the platform for authors from a community-building and visibility perspective, with its unsurpassed power to spread the word, engage readers, and generate promotional opportunities. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat combined could never pack the same punch that Facebook schmoozing can.

Throughout all my years as a writer and a publicist helping writers, a few constants about Facebook have reinforced this belief: [Read more…]