per·so·na
1. a person.
2. the narrator of or a character in a literary work, sometimes
identified with the author.
3. (in the psychology of C. G. Jung) the mask or façade
presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the
environment and not representing the inner personality of
the individual; the public personality.
4. a person's perceived or evident personality, as that of a well-
known official, actor, or celebrity; personal image; public role.
pa·ram·e·ter: (Mathematics)
a constant or variable term in a function that determines
the specific form of the function but not its general nature.
Wattpad, like any vivid venue, has its parameters, its ways of determining a User's form. These corner the User into being mischaracterized, though the User's gotta be okay with this. In other words, the Wattpad User, in his usage of Wattpad, agrees to be reduced to a persona, a facet of himself, selected by the geometry of Allen Lau's dream.
It's a fair enough trade I guess.
My persona around here as of late seems to have something to do with unselfishness. Do you know Jason? If you don't you probably should. He's a good one to know.
This persona is less problematic for me than tolerable, but it's still a reduction; it's a property of my general nature, not an encompassment of it. Whatever's informing my good-one-to-know-ness isn't shatterproof. I wish it were. For all you know it's schtick -- orchestrated by a user (in more sense than one, here) who only wants to be thought of in a favorable light, and who wants people (you) to believe a particular story (about me). Who knows what I'm really like outside Wattpad's sightly parameters?
Since each of us has been handed control of his or her own little media organization our task is to figure out how exactly we want to play this tech-dealt hand. And keep in mind, if you and I are going to be in business at all, we're going to be in the business of media.
echo chamber:
In media, an echo chamber is a situation in which information,
ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and
repetition. One purveyor of information will make a claim,
which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and
repeat again, until most people assume that some variation of
the story is true.
This is one way to go. The information you're repeating is the title of your book and where to find it; the idea you're trying to drive home is that people should read it / buy it; and the belief you want assumed is that they should be a fan of you. The more people you can beat over the head with this idea, the more fans you acquire, the more fans you acquire, the more the belief that you are worthy of fandom perpetuates, the more this belief perpetuates, the more books you ultimately sell.
In other words, use your personal media organization to promote, promote, promote (yourself).
Though this echo chamber, annoy-the-hell-out-of-everybody-except-for-the-people-that-don't-mind-it method can be pretty effective, especially in the short-term, and some writers suit it and are very good at it, most aren't. Most are catching flies with vinegar, operating this way. The flies that are caught aren't very savvy flies. But that's a whole other palaver.
The echo chamber method persists for two reasons:
1. It's convenient.
and
2. It's ubiquitous (so no one thinks to do anything different).
It's number 2 that I want to focus on for a second, since it's slightly more interesting. Most writers believe that, outside of landing the rarest kind of publishing deal, the echo chamber option is the ONLY option for readership expansion. This results in a two-sided split. On one side we get tons and tons of echo chambers, and on the other we get tons and tons of writers refusing to do them and bitching about having to.
The Bitchers either opt out in favor of huddling against the chest of whatever readership they already have, or they begrudgingly try the echo chamber method, hate it, burn out on it, and go back to bitching.
So let's pause for a second and talk about what social media actually is. All social media is is a transit system for word-of-mouth. Or some business types call it the "plumbing" of word-of-mouth. Important thing to know about this plumbing: it doesn't feel one way or another about what you send down its pipes. Its pipes may be configured in a suggestive kind of way, but they'll transport whatever you give 'em.
This is both good and bad news for me and you.
The good news is it means we can do whatever the hell we want.
The bad news is it means we can do whatever the hell we want.
Good news first.
Just because everywhere you look you see echo chambers that doesn't mean you have to do one. Don't let ubiquity fool you. Echo chambers work for people who are already well established, or else they work for up-and-comers who happen to have the right skillset for them (rote-stamina, a knack for writing copy, a knack for doing giveaways, a knack for exploiting their attractive attributes, being lucky enough to've been born with attractive attributes, etc.).
But the majority of echo chambers you come across are done out of laziness or lack of imagination. Most people suck at echo chambers. And most of what most people are doing with them is shouting into a void, creating clutter, and annoying their neighbors, which leads them to wonder why none of this is working very well.
Before we can talk about why none of this works very well, there's an entitlement issue that needs to be addressed here.
Something to really truly keep in mind is that very few people are going to give you their time, attention, or money JUST BECAUSE YOU KEEP TELLING THEM TO. I'm a reader / consumer who spends a lot of his time on the internet. Have you any idea how many writers and stories are vying for my attention in a given moment? Actually you do, because you're a reader / consumer who spends a lot of time on the internet too. So you shouldn't wonder why only 0.1% of your followers routinely respond to the "Read my shit! / Buy my shit! / Look at me! / I'm so great!" messages you're constantly sending them. They've tuned you out. Know why? Because all you ever say to them is "Read my shit! / Buy my shit! / Look at me! / I'm so great!"
Thought Experiment
Imagine Wattpad exactly as it is now: same number of accounts, same app users, same community, same structure, same everything. Except for one difference... there's only twelve stories on the site. 12. That's it. Now let's say that you, Dear Writer, come along and write Wattpad's thirteenth story. Should you echo-chamber-promote it? Of course you should. You just did millions of readers a humongous favor. You would be dumb NOT to shout about it constantly. Your work would be entitled to a ton of attention, rightly so.
Now: back to reality.
There are more stories on Wattpad than anyone could ever come close to close to close to reading. If anyone EVER reads your story, even a page of it, they're doing you a humongous favor. And this goes for the greater internet too. How many writers with product are there on the internet right now? Have you looked around? It's like bacteria in a colon out there.
If you're going to remember one thing from this perblessrant(*), remember this: The reading public is not your mom. Nobody owes you anything. Your job is not to bug people until they break down and make you a sandwich.
The Bad News
The bad news is, outside of the echo chamber model, there's no real blueprint for how to market yourself on social media. I hate the idea of marketing myself as much as you do, which is why (at least in my mind) I don't do it.
Truth
Back to my persona for a second. Is it real? The whole unselfishness getup? Yeah, pretty much it is. It comes out of the personal belief that if my transmissions aren't sufficiently valuable to at least a decent clip of people on the receiving end of them, then I shouldn't be transmitting in the first place.
How do you give people value? Good question. You give people value by either giving them something interesting or giving them something helpful. That's it. If you're giving them something interesting AND helpful on a consistent basis then you've pretty much solved your marketing problem. You don't have to sell interesting + helpful. It sells itself.
Just to be clear, when I say interesting here, I don't mean interesting to you. I mean interesting to you and somebody else. The same way your writing should be interesting to you and to your reader. It's the same principal.
Helpful is another matter. And this one's a little knottier. I'm not going to dare you to be helpful because it's a trappy proposition. The thing about helpful is you have to want to do it. And you have to want to do it because, unlike interesting, helpful is not for you. It's for whoever it is you're trying to help. You do it without expecting anything in return, which means you have to mean it.
If you don't mean it and try to employ helpfulness as a tactic, you cynical bastard, don't think there aren't going to be consequences.
The first consequence is that, if you value honesty at all, you're probably going to feel pretty icky with fake generosity as your SOP. The second is that astute observers are going to sniff your phoniness out, and that's oh so quietly damning. But the trappiest consequence to helpfulness-as-tactic is that people are going to start expecting you to be helpful. Like, all the time. It's going to become part of your persona. And good luck keeping up a saintly persona when it's based on a preconceived stratagem.
In short: don't help people unless you really mean it.
I mean it when I do it and I still have the saintly image problem. Why? Because of parameters and persona. People expect me to be nice all the time, and I'm not. It leads to awkward situations: Why is the generous guy yelling at me? and so forth. As confusing and awkward as these situations are I see them as good signs. They mean I don't reduce well. And resisting persona where appropriate is a healthy thing, I think.
The Best News
The best news is you're a writer; you know how to handle a sentence and communicate via text. Well, guess what the meat on the bones of social media is made of? Writers, photographers, artists, creative types of all kinds have been given a playground they refuse to use. They've relinquished the playground to marketers. Marketers who, I kid you not, are starting to behave like artists because they understand that on social media consumers respond to art. And what is art but giving? Marketers are, by necessity, becoming artful givers while artists sit around and bitch and complain about not being able to market. Snap out of it, maybe?
Dare
Here's what I dare you to do. You're a writer. The way you've always thought about the blank page? Start thinking of the entirety of social media that way. Social media is now an extension of the blank page -- it's your medium, expanded. Comment boxes, message boards, tweets, forum posts, all-followers blast-outs -- stop looking at these as ad opportunities and start looking at them as art opportunities.
Think like a graffiti writer. Most people look at a freeway and see a way to get from A to B. A graffiti writer looks at a freeway and sees an opportunity to place his art (which, in this case, is literally just his name) where people's eyeballs are. A marketer, by contrast, sees the freeway as an opportunity to place a billboard (a gigantic ad) right in front of everyone's faces. The difference between the marketer and the graffiti writer is that the marketer's ad is an ad, and the graffiti writer's ad is his art.
Let your ads be your art and your anxiety about having to market yourself melts away commensurately.
And resist persona when possible.
*perblessrant
1. a clumsy portmanteau Jason made up to describe what it is
he's doing here.
2. a personal essay, blog post, and rant combination.
3. the majority of chapters that follow in this collection will
probably be perblessrants.