shopify analytics ecommerce tracking
Walsh and Bolton Twitter Unconference Advertise Facebook Book Zazzle Search

Why There’s So Much Conflicting Advice About Social Media

By

Social media advice

It’s been one year since I started freelancing full time. The good news is that it’s going well. The bad news is that the financial complexities are exceeding my entrepreneurial experience. So I decided to enlist the services of a financial planner to analyze my situation and make recommendations.

The first step in the process is data discovery and collection. I spent all day Saturday—nearly a full eight hours—gathering paperwork and preparing estimates. Some of it is pure number crunching, but there’s also an aspect I didn’t anticipate: a lengthy questionnaire about my behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge about money.

I’ll be blunt: When it comes to personal finance, I know nothing. In a question asking what publications I read to stay informed about financial news and concerns, I couldn’t confirm having read a single one. On a full page of questions about financial management, I had to answer “Not Sure” for all.

I felt slightly better when my partner completed that page in exactly the same manner.

Cut to another entirely different scene—

I’m on a message board where I spot the very frequent question: Should I start a Facebook author page? I get asked this question at every single conference I attend, even when I’m not speaking on social media. And I find it an impossible question to answer in a roomful of people. [Read more…]

+10

Ask Annie: The Line Between Self-Promotion and Spam

By

Today I’m only tackling one question, because it’s slightly involved and also because I feel it’s an incredibly important topic for writers on Twitter. The submitter has asked to be kept anonymous, so some of the details of the writer’s specific situation have been changed or omitted to maintain privacy. Anonymous writes: Hello Annie, Thanks so much for the informative blogs on Twitter. Do you have an example of a line not to cross in self-promotion? My publisher stipulated up front that they … [Read more...]

There’s a Fine Line Between (Online) Love and Hate

By

Today’s guests are Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, authors of Your Perfect Life and, released this month, The Status of All Things. They have been best friends for more than twenty-five years. Liz lives in San Diego with her two children. Lisa, a former talk show producer, lives in Chicago with her husband, daughter and two bonus children. We're passionate about the topic of not overexposing yourself online because as authors we run the risk of doing it every day! Plus, our forthcoming novel The … [Read more...]

Is It Really Your Duck?

By

Thanks to the internet, it is now easier than ever to get information about the publishing industry. Even if you live in a ghost town, you can connect with writers all over the world, via blogs, social media, forums. The downside to all this connectivity? Someone, somewhere, is going to say something to piss you off. It will seem blatantly ignorant, wildly unfair, or simply, utterly wrong. You are going to see other writers who seem vastly unqualified achieving levels of success and … [Read more...]

Ask Annie: Meeting People on Twitter, Hanging Out, and Getting Found

By

  @AnnieNeugebauer WU Twitter question. Writers "meet" each other on Twitter. How? How do people "hang out" with Tweets? I'm a noob. :) --Abigail Welborn ‏@AbigailFair This is a great question! The answer is simpler than it might seem: they tweet to each other. If you don’t include a handle (a person’s username following the @ symbol) in the beginning of a tweet, that tweet goes “public,” meaning it will appear in all of your followers’ timelines. (Do keep in mind that all tweets are … [Read more...]

The Evolution of an Author Website

By

When I started out as a serious writer, back in the mid-1990s, I didn’t even own a home computer. I wrote in longhand and word-processed after hours at work. Once I had my first publishing contract I acquired a home PC and got internet access, and a family member who worked in IT set up an author website for me. It was pretty simple, a basic template with a Celtic border framing each page of text. The pages were Author Bio, Books, Contact and News. There were links to several online forums run … [Read more...]

Ask Annie: Retweeting @Mentions, Building a Target Audience, and Following Back

By

Welcome to my first Ask Annie column, where I’ll be answering all of your Twitter questions right here on Writer Unboxed every other month. I’ll pick 1-5 questions each time, depending on the length of the answers. I save all of the questions I receive, so if I didn’t get to yours this time, that doesn’t mean it’s out of the running! (More on how to submit your own question at the end of this post.) Let’s jump right in with our first question.   If I'm mentioned in a tweet, should I … [Read more...]

The 10 Most Generic Tweets of All Time

By

Twitter is chock full of vague, generic, redundant tweets. Usually my eyes skim over them like the filler they are, but every once in a while I’ll sink into one and roll around in the absurdity of it. I have no excuse other than sheer glee at such nonsense. (Yes, my humor is a little twisted.) [pullquote]I have an announcement! I'll be looking for your questions about the strange and magical ways of Twitter – everything from function to etiquette to theory – and answering a few of them right … [Read more...]

The Online Presence That’s a Natural Extension of Who You Are and What You Do. (Is It Just Fantasy?)

By

I’ve been reading with interest (and sympathy) the comments on Porter Anderson’s Unboxed post last week, where we see the familiar Sturm und Drang of writers grappling with the demands of online marketing—or how to be publicly communicative and chummy when it’s against our nature, perhaps even against our work. This has remained a problem for a long time now, hasn’t it? One of my favorite thinkers is Alan Watts, who once said, “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be … [Read more...]

The Great Twitter Debate: Should You Follow Back?

By

Apparently I’m a glutton for punishment, because if there's one topic that could be considered controversial about the usage of Twitter, it’s this one. When someone new follows you, should you follow them back? Some say yes, of course; it’s rude not to. Some say no, why should I? Twitter isn’t meant to be reciprocal. Others (like me) land somewhere in the middle. And still others are baffled, overwhelmed, or totally undecided. Today I’m going to break down each school of thought in hopes … [Read more...]

Everything You Need to Know About the @Reply

By

Okay, tweeps and future tweeps! So far in my column we’ve covered getting started on Twitter, the retweet, the #hashtag, and basic Twitter etiquette. Today I’m going to go over the ins and outs of another Twitter staple: the @reply, also known as a mention. (Still not sure if this whole Twitter thing is even for you? This post might help you decide.) Terminology First and foremost, what’s that at symbol for? The at symbol (@: read as “at” in common speech) followed by a username is called a … [Read more...]

Twitter Etiquette 101

By

It might (or might not) come as a surprise to you that many writers hate Twitter. I confess that I’ve had my own “die, Twitter, die” moments over the years, and it’s usually due to discourtesy. The character limit, the flood of information, the time drain: those I can stomach. But people being rude or obnoxious? Well, I think we’ve all had moments where we wanted to jump ship. Unfortunately, we can’t make everyone else use Twitter well. What we can do as denizens of the writing Twit-o-sphere … [Read more...]

Getting Started on Twitter

By

After weighing the pros and cons of Twitter last time, maybe you’ve decided to take the leap. But you’re understandably overwhelmed, because Twitter is a strange and mysterious land to the uninitiated. Never fear! I’m here with the basics of what you need to do to start off your Twitter life with a bang. And even if this Twitter thing is old hat to you, I hope you’ll give it a quick glance, because there are tips for everyone hiding in these basics. Let’s go! 1. Use the name you publish … [Read more...]

Pram in the Hall

By

You know that question everyone always asks writers? The one about what we do all day? In my experience most writers spend their days doing a lot of nothing — interspersed with trying in vain to organize vast teetering piles of books and papers, totally forgetting the thing we swore blind we’d be doing this afternoon, along with wasting endless hours on the internet. If you add, say, half an hour of writing to that grueling schedule, plus getting your child to school and back, some dog-patting, … [Read more...]