Final Writeup

Project Wiki: ProWritersAndSocialMedia
Project Proposal: ProjectProposalKevinMcColley
Project Website

FinalWriteupWorkpage

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I’ve included the detailed breakdown of the data I’ve gathered since the start of the project in the final compilation included on the project wiki and on the work page, both linked above. This writeup will be both more analytical and more general.

Websites.

Websites remained static throughout the study, so I won’t discuss them much in this writeup. There was considerable rhetorical variation between them, but that is a subject for a separate course, namely, The Elements of Electronic Rhetoric. What social interaction the websites allowed was limited primarily to links to the authors’ social media accounts, which I will go into detail about below.

Most dominant business use of blogs, and why:

1. Promoting Books.
2. Describing, or answering questions about, the writing process.
3. Promoting author appearances.
4. Referencing other writers.

Blogs had a tight grouping of uses–posts weren’t focused on book promotions much more than they were on references to other writers, though book promotions were the primary purpose for blog posts. The reason why they were, I think, is because both tweets and Facebook posts have length limitations, while blog posts allow as much room as the author needs. This room allows authors to post illustrations of book jackets, story summaries, and quotes or links to favorable book reviews or comments made by other writers in a single post. A couple of examples, from John Scalzi: Redshirts Chapters 1 – 4 Now Out in eBook Form (scroll down his blog to read it), and from Joe Abercrombie: Red Country US Cover (again, scroll down the blog).

Most dominant business use of Twitter, and why:

1. Thank yous to readers.
2. Promoting author appearances.
3. Responding to readers’ questions.
4. Promoting books.
5. Discussing awards and ceremonies.

With Twitter, thank yous to readers predominated, and if that category is generalized into responses to readers, combining both thank yous and answering questions, that category greatly predominated. This was due, I think, to the immediacy and intimacy associated with Twitter: readers can expect a quick and personal response because their tweets are delivered quickly and responses are individualized. A couple of examples: the first a thank you from Emily St. John Mandel to a reader of her most recently published book:

@JustBethanne Great talking to you! Let’s definitely have coffee the next time we’re both in NYC.

And the second, a response from Neil Gaiman to a reader who had followed him down the street and asked if the person she was following was really him:

@cinditt58 I am not permitted to explain. The run of bad luck that now begins in your life is merely coincidence.

The high ranking of discussing awards and ceremonies may have been due to the announcements of the Pulitzer Prizes and of the nominees for the Hugo Awards during the analysis period. Without these announcements, this category would have been rated much lower.

Most dominant business use of Facebook, and why:

1. Promoting Books.
2. Promoting author appearances.
3. Describing, or answering questions about, the writing process.
4. Discussing Film Rights.
5. Discussing awards and ceremonies.

Use here was not weighted heavily. The posts that generated the most responses tended to be those concerning the writing process. Facebook is ideal for such posts: post size is limited in Facebook, but not so limited that the author can’t make a complete description of some aspect of the writing life, and Facebook allows readers, who for some reason tend to be fascinated by the subject, to easily respond. Facebook also works well to promote author appearances: questions from readers concerning those appearances are easy to address. Here’s the way Salman Rushdie used his Facebook page to promote an appearance he made.

The most efficacious business use of blogs: Book Promotion. The advantages of blogs for book promotion are that they allow in-depth explanations of plots and characters, portrayal of covers, and links to praise, either from reviewers or blurbs from other authors. Blogs allow the room to promote the book fully, something neither Facebook or Twitter have room to allow. Also, there is more implied separation between the author and the reader in a blog, compared to either Facebook or Twitter, which gives the promotion more of an advertizing feel. Groundwater and Abercrombie used blogs for this purpose particularly well.

The most efficacious business use of Twitter: Thank yous and responses to readers. The defining characteristics for Twitter in terms of social media use for professional writers is intimacy and immediacy. A personal response to a reader creates a reader for life–that reader will then buy everything a writer has ever written or will ever write. Atwood and Gaiman did this particularly well, and in volume: Gaiman often approached one hundred or more such responses a day.

The most efficacious business use of Facebook: Descriptions of the writing process. Such descriptions do not require the room of a blog, yet require more room than Twitter allows. Readers like to look into the world of the writer and ask questions about it; Facebook allows such responses. Groundwater handles this best, with Irving a close second.

Unexpected discoveries:

1. Twitter proved to have far more efficacy than I expected, primarily because Twitter proved to be far more intimate with an author’s followers than I expected. I expected the primary and most effective use of Twitter to be as a platform for links either to publishing sites or authors’ blogs; what actually proved to be most effective was short, direct responses to readers, either in answering their questions about a work or the writing process, or in thanking a reader for buying, reading, or praising a book.
2. Authors used Facebook far less frequently than I expected–the overwhelming majority of time that authors spent using social media was spent using Twitter.
3. I expected a far more regular use of blogs: once a week, twice a week, etc. What I found was that blogs ran hot and cold: authors would often put up a flurry of posts for a day or two, then none at all for a week or longer. John Scalzi proved to be the most effective writer at using his blog, but even his blog use was far outweighed by his use of Twitter.
4. The most interesting use of social media I found, and I found it in both in the use of Twitter and blogs, was the author engaging the reader in the actual creative process. Atwood, Irving, and Gaiman used this approach. Atwood asked readers if she should write a sequel to a previous work; she also asked for readers’ ideas on the details of the structure of one of her dystopian worlds. Gaiman asked readers what he should name characters. Irving used Facebook to gauge reader response to a bisexual main character. (Readers were in favor, contrary to the opinion of the publisher. The publisher promptly changed that opinion.) I suspect that authors might have only asked these questions as teasers–attempts by the authors to engage the readers in only supposed interaction with the creative process in order to hook the reader into the story to get them to later buy the book: I’ll be curious to see how many of those suggestions from readers the author actually incorporates (with the exception of Irving, which has already been incorporated). Here’s the way John Irving used Facebook to engage his readers in his novel in progress.

What I would do differently, were I do to it again:

1. As Kelly Ryan suggested, I would define the categories of authors–emerging and established–more clearly, perhaps by the number of published books, perhaps by the time the author has been working professionally, or perhaps by the size of their readership. This would enable me to better classify and determine the outcomes.
2. I would include Tumblr in my analysis–several authors, in particular Gaiman–use Tumblr frequently enough to warrant that.
3. I would try to find a way to lurk in the background more effectively–one author, John Scalzi, realized I was monitoring his use of social media, and his behavior changed in response.
4. Simply for the ease of data collection bookkeeping, I would try to have categories in which to place posts and tweets before I began the process, rather than determining them as I went along.
5. I would consider splitting the project into two parts: the first analyzing authors with large enough audiences so that lurking and monitoring would have a better chance of going unnoticed, and the second, authors with smaller audiences, probably informing the authors beforehand of what I was doing–this so that all of the authors would know they were being observed, so their responses would be more uniform.
6. I would also pre-monitor the authors, in order to determine their suitability for the study.

What went well: Data collection. Though it could grow tedious, especially with Twitter, it wasn’t complicated and it provided a lot of information. It was basically bookkeeping, but that bookkeeping allowed what I think became good analysis.

What didn’t go well:

1. Getting caught lurking. The knowledge that an author was being monitored changed that author’s social media behavior.
2. Some authors, though they had social media accounts, never used them. Though that says something about professional writers and their use of social media, I don’t think it said enough to warrant including them in the study.

Problems encountered:

1. Getting caught lurking. The behavior of the author (John Scalzi) then changed. There was really no remedy for this, given the nature of the forms of social media I was studying.
2. I developed categories in which to place tweets and posts as I went along, and this required me to go back and categorize and re-categorize earlier posts into later developed categories. The obvious remedy for this is to determine at least some of the categories beforehand.

Final Conclusions:

1. Authors’ use of social media varied widely. Completely setting aside the fact that some authors don’t use social media at all and so don’t have accounts, those who do have accounts can vary in the use of those accounts from not at all through moderate use to such heavy and frequent use that I have a hard time imagining when they have time to write. A good follow-up research project might be to compare the quality of the work authors who heavily use social media from before they began using it to after they started.
2. Of authors who use social media, their use of the several media varied widely. Those who primarily used blogs tended not to use Twitter or Facebook very heavily; those who used Twitter heavily tended not to use blogs or Facebook to nearly the same extent; those who used Facebook heavily tended not to post to their blogs or to use Twitter. The most notable exception to this trend was John Scalzi, who used both his blog and Twitter heavily. The overall lesson to take from this fact as an author might be to focus primarily on a single medium, identified by the goals the author wishes to accomplish.
3. As far as genre and the use of social media is concerned, if there was a trend at all, the trend seemed to be that those authors who wrote more academic, literary fiction tended to use social media least, while those who wrote genre fiction, especially science fiction, tended to use it most. This might have more to do with audience than with anything else: science fiction readers tend to be more technologically savvy than non-science fiction readers, and readers of literary fiction tend to be more old school.
4. As far as emerging authors using social media compared to established authors using social media is concerned, the trend was clearly that more established authors used social media more heavily: three of the four authors with the largest audiences–Atwood, Gaiman, and Scalzi (the exception being Irving)–were also the three heaviest users, while the three authors with the smallest audiences–Morrissey, Russell, and Abercrombie–used it least. I don’t have enough information to say that the use of social media directly correlates to an author’s success, and I’d be surprised if it did, since the dominant reason for an author’s success has always been, and I suspect continues to be, the author’s writing skill. What I think can be said is that social media can contribute to an author’s success–my study gave no indication that there is an inverse correlation between the use of social media and an author’s success. And, of course, the fact that an author having a larger readership means that he or she will get more responses to posts and tweets, and therefore more traffic on their social media accounts would also have to be factored in.