I need help. Those of you out there who are knowledgeable,
easily more so than I, please chime in. I’m completely inundated by emails that
come from social media sources. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Klout, Yahoo
groups and I’m sure others I’m not thinking of at this moment.
We all have been told that if you don’t have a presence on
the social media networks you are dead in the water for your publishing. Great.
I get it. I know there are some publishing houses that check to see how many
followers you have before even reading your submission. Okay, I sort of get
that too. Well, sort of.
I have writer friends who absolutely love their Facebook and
Yahoo connections. They live on the links. I confess I have a few private loops
that I do truly enjoy the communication. Yet it’s not a compulsion. Goodness
help me if it were because it would take all day to manage. When would I write?
But, how do you keep it all in line? It takes me a
chunk of time to repeatedly hit my delete key. I only respond to the emails
that are important to me. Yet that is still time consuming. Even if I don’t
respond, many I want to read.
Again, what are your tricks to managing all of this? I know
I’m not alone.
I’m not even raising the question of privacy. I cringe as I
receive multiple emails a day telling me I’ve won the Irish lottery, pleas for
helping a damaged soul in the Middle East or am eligible for body parts that I
don’t wish to have. Where are these emails coming from? I am sure it’s tied to
the social media connections. Yet, we are stuck.
If we go “silent” we are told we are in trouble. If we are
“out there” we are in trouble. So, I ask you. What are your strategies for
keeping your nose and privacy above water?
7 comments:
Cassy, We all gave up some privacy when we decided to become authors. Goes with the territory.
Email- I have three different accounts with 99% of the junk mail going into one of them, usually the spam/bulk folder. The other two I use for business and personal use as they have great filters that don't let the junk in.
Social media-I try to limit my time on FB in the morning, then during the day only go back during a writing break. With the publisher I just signed with they have a yahoo group loop and I get the posting daily in digest form. This way I can see the posts, comments and decide which I want to respond to.
Good luck
Any groups you belong to on Facebook have a NOTIFICATIONS setting - you can turn off notifications and emails - I've had people add me to groups without my permission and suddenly bombarded in my email with things of little interest to me. Hope this helps!!
Ingrid :)
Lindsay: Thanks so much. Multiple addresses makes total sense. EXCEPT, I never can remember what I have connected to what.
Ingrid!!! I always love to hear from you. Good idea about the notifications. I need to look into that. I get totally flooded and it's not great.
Cassy, this is such an issue with me too. I'm just overwhelmed with groups, loops, and email. I get added to groups and sometimes I leave them, sometimes I stay and post someone once every month or so. I've gotten to the point that I skim email for the important stuff. I don't let myself get carried away with FB and Twitter. Or Goodreads. You can spend a ton of time there. So I think you have to prioritize and then skim. Lots of people won't check email or any social media until they've made their word count for the day. I don't do that, but I should. I don't have any great ideas, but I know that it's a terrible cycle. You need the presence on social media but it steals writing time.
And I do have some groups set up with emails going straight to folders in Outlook. I don't even see those emails if I don't want to. It's not really necessary since I could go to the yahoo group and see those posts, but it's not as convenient. :) I'm on digest on a few loops. Those are the ones I skim. But even that takes time. I have a ton of FB groups and I've set notifications so that I don't get the emails. I just go over every now and then and see what's going on.
I've considered using only one social media or group every day for only a few minutes. I could hit five different groups in a week, or ten if I did two. Email is one I can't get ignore. Don't want to miss an email from my editor or a fan.
This is a dilemma for me, too. I love Facebook, but I'm on all the others, too and get a ton of emails. I'm trying to wean myself off them, especially because I have a deadline looming and a big summer planned.
The advice I'm seeing a lot of lately is that you are successful if you have a ton of things out there for people to read. They say cut down on all the marketing everyone says you need and simply put your butt in the chair and write. Oh, If only I could do that!!
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