Social Media Overload

Apparently my brain can only manage an hour or two of social media networking a day before I get antsy and have to go do something else. Or maybe it's just I can only do one of them: blog, facebook, pinterest, messageboard, because I have noticed that when I start spending time on one of them, then my participation in the others drops off. Note that the last blog post was on September 16th and I haven't even been reading other peoples blogs in the past two months or so. Because I got hooked back into Facebook.

Yes, she who has made her low opinion of Facebook widely known got hooked back into using Facebook. And thus really the point of this blog post are my observations on this go around of facebooking.

I started sneaking onto Facebook last May. My son was in Afghanistan. Whenever I read a news article about soldiers getting killed over there, I would sneak on and check his recent activity to see when was the last time he was on. After a few months of this, one of my friends caught me at it and started a chat. And then the facebook vortex sucked me in and pretty soon I was reading my newsfeed and whatever.

But this time was different because I started liking the pages of the things I am also interested in like wildlife and the environment. And I started interacting with my high school friends and looking up old friends. In other words, this time I started using Facebook as it was intended to be used as a tool for keeping in contact with friends and family not for marketing purposes. A much more enjoyable experience.

What I have noticed among my writer friends is that many are not using facebook effectively. Either they log on every now and then and post a link to their blog/book/publisher, then log off; or they overload the newsfeed with a lot of links to their friend's and their own blog/book/publisher. If there are ten or more posts like that in a row, then I look at the first one or two and scroll past the rest. Only a few interact with their friends and followers talking about something other than writing.

Using popular authors to illustrate my point: J K Rowling is one who posts every now and then with a link to her new book while romance author Susan Elizabeth Phillips is one who engages with her fans. She recently went on a camping trip to Morocco and posted pics of Morocco, riding a camel, the tents, etc. It was rather interesting. Next time you're on facebook look both of them up and see the difference.

I also discovered something very interesting about the news feed in Facebook. It doesn't show you everything that has been posted. So when I post something in my status or share a link, picture, or video, only a few people actually see it, not everyone I am friends with. They have developed an algorithm to determine which posts you are most likely to want to see. So if all you do is log on every now and then and post a link to your book/blog/publisher, then very few of your friends will actually see it. There is a work around this problem. I haven't figured it out yet.

I'm still of the opinion that facebook is not a good tool for marketing purposes especially now that I am aware of the newsfeed algorithm. But if you are primarily using it to stay connected with friends and family, then the occasional post about your book/blog/publisher will have a greater chance at being seen, read, and shared.

Food for thought. 

Copyright Infringement vs. Plagiarism

Back in November there was a case of copyright infringement that got picked up by Neil Gamain and Wil Wheaton who tweeted about it and then all hell broke loose. During the course of the brouhaha many people mistakenly called it plagiarism.

Last week, the plagiarism case against J. K. Rowling was dismissed by the US Judge in the case.

Which leads me to talk about the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Copyright infringement is when you take something someone else wrote and publish it in some format with the author's name but without the author's permission.

Plagiarism is when you take something that someone else wrote and publish it in some format with your name as the author.

The difference is in whose name is on the work. So if you published or sold the right to publish "Scribbles by the Scribbling Sea Sprite" without my permission, then you have infringed on my copyrights. If you published or sold the right to publish "Scribbles by your name", then you have plagiarised my work.

That's the basics. It gets more complicated than that and there are several books that go into it in depth: "Copyright Plain and Simple" by Cheryl Besenjak; "Literary Law Guide for Authors" by Tonya Marie Evans and Susan Borden Evans; and "The Copyright Permission and Libel Handbook" by Lloyd J. Jassin and Steven C. Schechter. I suggest purchasing those books and keeping them on your bookshelf.

What is interesting about the Cook Source's case is that recipes can not be copyrighted. The text discussing the recipe is and the name of a dish can be trademarked, but the recipe itself is not protected by copyright. If the editor had just published the recipes and written her own text, then she would have been in the clear.

As for the plagiarism case against Rowling, ideas can't be copyrighted. The execution of the story idea is copyrighted, but the idea itself is not. Why this is can be seen in Emerald Tales. Each issue has a theme or idea, and every story that I received was different from the rest. I don't have a single instance where two stories were similar enough to make me question the source of that story.

Off on a tangent because I don't want to write another post about facebook, I came across the following article about the pros and cons of facebook. The more I read about facebook, the less I like it.

Facebook and Twitter

Some ruminations on the ever popular facebook and twitter:

When I first started researching the how tos of small publishing, conventional wisdom was that one needed both a facebook account and a twitter account in order to effectively market one's product. My experience is that they both can be effective marketing tools if one spends a lot of time on the computer and one can work with more than one window active.

While I have both a facebook account and a twitter account, I don't have the time to devote to making them work for me as a marketing tool. And I can't work with more than one window open at a time. I lose track of what I am doing and make many mistakes.

Unlike my website and my blog, what I post on those accounts is only available to be seen by the people that I am friends with or who are following me. Facebook and Twitter are not the most effective tools for reaching people who don't already know you. I find it rather surprising that they are/were so strongly advocated, because a blog and a website are much more effective at reaching people you don't already know. Anyone can read this blog. And if the Chinese spammers and hackers can find my website, then it is pretty easy for anyone else to find it, too.

Not to mention that your status and your tweets about your book are buried in everyone else's blathering about what they ate for dinner, how tired they are, OMG I just watched the most fantastic episode of Glee, and John found a lonely bull on his farm will you give it a home. I have to wonder how those who have used facebook and twitter to market their work got through all that noise.

If you made up flyers or bookmarks or something similar and took them down to the library, independent bookseller, coffeeshop, etc, you would have a better chance at reaching people interested in your book than you would with casual use of facebook and twitter.

The bottomline is don't sign up for a facebook account and/or a twitter account thinking that it's a great marketing tool. It takes a lot of time and effort on your part to make them work for you.