Welcome back.
Thanks, great to be here. Is it okay if I start with a quick reminder of what this blog is and what it is not?
Sure.
Thanks. So, this is not a ‘How To’ guide. This is just my personal experience as I journey from #BlankPageToBookstore in 2024. I hope my experience might be useful to someone else in some way, but I’m not suggesting anyone does anything the way I did it.
Would you like to remind us what #BlankPageToBookstore is about?’
Sure. I have written hundreds of short stories and poems and 23 novel manuscripts. But, I have never published a novel, and I have never had an ‘author platform.’ You know… a website, social media, a blog and the rest.
In 2024, I have decided to change that. This year, I will write a book and publish it. Either through traditional publishing or self-publishing… whichever comes first.
Great. Your #BlankPageToBookstore plan for this week was to ‘stand up’ social media. How did that go?
Good. I think. Though, it was scary. I am not really a social media user. The whole thing freaks me out a little. I tend to overthink things… linger on my mistakes. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I suppose… hone in on the detail at the sake of the bigger picture.
I don’t really like the idea of putting things out into the world that go onto my permanent record. It’s maybe why I’ve written 23 novel manuscripts and never published any of them. I’m guessing it’s tough to fix a typo after printing 5,000 books.
Or a million.
Yes. Wow. Thank goodness I don’t have that problem. (Laughs…)
Did you overcome that fear in some meaningful way?
Sort of. Not really. I don’t know. I did relax a bit when I learned there are some ‘takebacks’ in social media. Most platforms allow some degree of editing or curating of your content.
Just you might lose status or feedback associated with the content you’ve already posted if you muck about with it too much afterward.
I’m not too fussed about that yet. So it’s a bit of a relief to know I can still edit after posting… you know… in an emergency.
Like a life-saving comma?
Ah… yes. (Laughs…) something like that.
What platform do you start with?
Twitter… or X now I suppose.
How was that?
Good and bad, like most things on social media. It was very easy to set up an account. I just Googled ‘add new Twitter account’ and went to the signup page.
There was a glitch that claimed my author name was already taken, but that seemed to be just on the mobile app. It was all good when I tried again on the desktop.
Was that the bad?
No, the bad was, after I signed into my new account and going to my personal feed, the first thing Twitter served up to me was a fight.
Boxing or UFC or something?
No, a fight between 2 schoolboys in a carpark where one punched the other one unconscious until an adult onlooker, grinning, came over to check if the unconscious boy was still alive.
Oh.
It was awful on many levels. Someone filmed that. Some adult stood by and watched that happen. And I watched that all the way through to the end, too stunned to stop.
Honestly, of all the billions of pieces of content from across the globe… the most popular thing on Twitter was two schoolboys fighting in a carpark.
Life’s not all glamour, I suppose.
Yes… I know… but… I don’t know… it genuinely made me feel sick. I half thought about giving up on the whole ‘author platform’ thing then and there.
So, was that it for Twitter? Did you write off one of the biggest social media platforms based on one dodgy video?
Yes, but it wasn’t just because of one dodgy video. I’ll come back to that.
Oh, okay.
First I’d like to step through the platform selection process I followed.
Okay, what did you try next.
Next, I tried Instagram. I wanted to avoid being fed another awful video, so I took the time to customise my setup answering all those questions about my interests.
I chose writing and reading and music and whatever else, and that was when I saw the ‘other side’ of social media. And it was truly beautiful. I mean… in a very literal sense. Mind-boggling. Amazing.
In what way?
There are just so many creative, thoughtful, insightful, beautiful people in the world with something to share.
It was beyond humbling. I felt like… an amoeba first tasting the brackish water of my new… very large… pond.
Wow. You really hadn’t used social media much before, had you?
(Laughs…) no. I had some news feeds and belonged to some chat groups with some friends, but that was about it. I always worried social media would be a huge time suck, and I wanted to spend my time writing… not sucking.
You know you can balance things?
No. That is not something I do.
Okay. So, what happened next?
I sort of floundered about in my new pond for a while, not knowing where to start. I researched social media strategies on Google, ChatGPT and Reddit, but the options are endless. For a start, I had no clue how many platforms there even were.
How many?
ChatGPT gave me the most popular 25. Then, when I pressed harder, it gave me another 25 of the up-and-comers.
That does seem like a lot.
Yes. My first plan was to register on all 50… to make sure I secured my identity there… in case I ever chose to use one of the platforms one day.
That seems like an awful idea.
(Laughs…) yes. It was.
Is that what you did?
No. Thankfully. I researched some more and discovered that a whole bunch of authors have given up on social media entirely because they spread themselves too thin… and their writing suffered.
The best advice seemed to be that authors not do social media at all… or else they focus on a single platform… 2 or 3 at most.
Oh. How many did you settle on?
Well, zero wasn’t an option. A big part of #BlankPageToBookstore is to have a go at building an ‘author platform,’ so some form of social media is a given.
I’m not a household name, so I can’t expect to just tweet some things on Twitter and build a following. I knew I needed a mix of platforms to start with. But there are only so many hours in the day. I chose 3.
Namely?
It took me a while to narrow that down. Each platform has different demographics and strengths and weaknesses in terms of types of content.
Not having a genre or a target audience for the book I will be writing for #BlankPageToBookstore didn’t help to narrow things down. And I didn’t have any real idea what sort of content I was going to create.
Though, I read a lot about social media content needing to be visually appealing, so some form of photographic or video content was going to be important.
I settled on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok because they are visually focused and I should be able to share content across the platforms relatively easily. Though, I also registered on Facebook, Reddit and Goodreads… and I had already registered on Twitter. Not sure if/how I’ll use those others yet. But I wanted to have them on standby in case.
How was the registration process across the platforms?
Mostly okay once I had all the materials I needed to register.
Materials?
Yes.
Like?
Like a writing bio of three different lengths. 200 words, 100 words and 150 characters, a wide/narrow banner image for the top of the home pages and a head shot.
What came after registration?
I spent a couple of days stressing… like really stressing… over what content to post.
I knew I wasn’t going to do funny dog and cat videos… but I had nothing else more specific in mind.
I thought about photos of my writing process, the books I was reading, reviews of books, snippets of my writing, maybe jazzing some short pros with some photos, or video snippets. All of that seemed fairly legit… as in real authors are doing all of those things… but nothing really lit my creative fire.
What did you do?
I remembered some things I made for my own amusement five or six years ago. They were nothing more than visual doodling using cartooning software.
They were thoughts and anecdotes and poems I turned into moving GIFs. They weren’t much more than stick-figure animations a few seconds long, but they were fun to make and a bit different. I pulled those out and dusted them off.
Turns out I have a few other strings to my bow than writing that might be useful for social media. I know a bit about audio and video production, and I’ve been mucking around with AI long before ChatGPT.
I brought those things together and remade those old cartoons using modern editing tools and AI generation.
How did that go?
Better than I’d hoped actually. I really like them.
I like them as their own creations, but I also like that they are a way to bring some of my poetry to life that would otherwise never see the light beyond my Google Drive. Though, I did get a little caught up in… creating.
How so?
Well… I pretty much just crawled back into my comfortable hobbit hole of making content. I pushed aside the hard stuff… all that social media stuff I’ve long feared.
You mean the entire goal of the week.
(Laughs…) yes, that’s the one.
Is there somewhere I can go and take a look at what you made to get a better idea of what you came up with?
Sure, I managed to get three of them up on Instagram so far.
Here is the link to my Instagram page: https://instagram.com/HarperStonewood
Thanks. Wow. The animations and music really do bring your words to life.
(Laughs…) thanks. There is a lot of really great animation and spoken word out there, but I think my clips hold their own.
How do you think they fit into your overall brand?
Yeah. I did struggle a bit there. Most of my writing has been Fantasy, Sci-Fi and thrillers. Not sure that comes across in the clips. Or even that I’m a writer at all.
That’s okay for now. Everything I’ve read says to focus on quality content. These are the best I can do for now. Hopefully, they stand up as mini-works on their own. I can work out how to craft my story around them later.
Sounds sensible.
Thanks. To be fair, my 16-year-old son is the sensible one in this scenario. He knows a helluva lot more about social media than me… along with a bunch of other stuff…
He said not to worry about ‘branding’ yet. He said everyone on social media takes a while to work out their brand.
He said, just post a hundred things and try to improve on something with each post.
That seems pretty clever.
Yes… he’s a very clever kid
How many do you have?
Kids?
No. Posts.
6 so far. They do take quite a lot of time to create… a dozen hours or so for the longer ones. That’s knowing all the tools and with the words already written.
6 in a week, a dozen hours each. That math doesn’t add up.
I haven’t slept much.
You really did go down the creative rabbit hole.
Rabbit hole is where I live, just an ever changing run of rabbits. Though, I know that sort of effort is not sustainable. I can’t spend days making clips each week and hope to also write 3000 word blogs and all the stuff I need to write and publish the book… not to mention job and family and all the rest.
Blueberries. Good for the brain. Though, not as good as sleep.
(Laughs…) thanks.
So, all 6 clips are posted on all 3 of your target platforms?
No. I read that I should bulk upload some content to start with, but also that I should ‘drip feed’ quality content on a regular basis. I decided to split the difference. I have uploaded 3 for now. I will post the others later and then… hopefully… continue to create and post new ones through the year.
How was the posting process?
Stressful.
How so?
Well, there were all the ‘putting myself out there’ barriers to overcome, but it was also technically harder than I expected.
How so?
Basic things like the video format and aspect ratios and which subsection of the platform to post on took research and preparation. Then there was the naming and descriptions and choosing the hashtags… and all the rest.
How hard can things like video format be? Everyone posts clips from their phones every minute of the day. You can even just record your stuff straight onto the platforms. Surely, that’s all easy.
Yes, it is if you’re doing funny dog or cat videos. But I read that if you’re trying to build a following, you need to make the highest quality posts they can. For me, that meant following the formatting guidelines of my chosen platforms.
Are they really so different?
Yes. Each platform has a lot of potential variation. I found some some middle ground, but even then there are specifics for each platform.
What middle ground did you find?
I narrowed down to 2 primary video formats that cover most of what I need.
16:9 aspect ratio videos at 1920X1080 resolution at 30 frames/second, targeted at horizontal displays like YouTube for watching on a computer.
9:16 aspect ratio videos at 1080X1920 resolution at 30 frames/second, targeted at vertical displays like TikTok on phones.
That doesn’t sound so hard.
No, it doesn’t. But just deciding on those took some research. Even then, it’s not as straightforward as making the one video and outputting it in two different formats.
I started off by producing everything in 16:9 1920X1080 because that’s standard high definition for computers and TVs. Then, once I was completely happy with the 16:9 clips, I flipped to 9:16 aspect ratio.
But, for the best results, I needed to manually reset every image and object to align to the new ratio. There are automatic tools that can use to resolve to the new aspect ratio at a button click, but half your content gets cropped in the process.
The manual aspect ratio changes took about an hour for each clip. But I was much happier with the result than the automated options. The biggest downside was I then had 2 different versions of each clip.
Deciding to change anything in a clip meant changing and rendering both clips again. So, it was best to leave it as late in the process as possible. Though, my perfectionist tendencies meant I kept tinkering longer than I should have.
All that said, it turns out YouTube shorts, Instagram reels and TikTok all use a vertical format, so I can get away with using a single format… and only making the other format later if needed.
Though, I’m not sure about doing that yet. Converting back the other way from 9:16 (vertical) to 16:9 (horizontal) will probably look too stretched and distorted. I might try that on the next clip and see, as it would save about an hour per clip.
Sorry, I feel a bit dazed after all that.
Yeah, I know… it’s all pretty dry. But it’s important. Not something you need to worry about if you’re just filming live action on your phone, like I said, but I’m not planning to do that. So, I need to be across these things.
With your clips in the right formats, what came next?
Next, I needed to post them to the platforms.
Was that straightforward?
Yes and no.
How so?
I started with Instagram. I read that I needed some extra stuff I hadn’t prepared yet. I needed a cover image. Instagram lets you select a frame of your video as the cover image, but I only found that out in the posting process. By then, I had already prepared an image for each video at Instagram’s required resolution spec of 420X645.
Then, I needed the information that accompanies the post. For Instagram, it’s called comments, and you embed the title of the clip, the description and all the Hashtags in the comments to inform whoever is watching the clip as well as seeding the search engines so that hopefully someone can find it.
I spent a few hours with ChatGPT crafting the comments and the Hashtag choices. Did I mention my perfectionist tendencies?
(Laughs…) yes you did.
Lesson learned after posting was that no one really puts much in their description except a key word or two of branding and/or some Hashtags. So, after posting I went back in and deleted most of the extended description.
Then you posted?
First I chose my hashtags… which is the primary key that search engines use to make connections across posts and even across platforms, seeking to enhance the consumer’s experience by narrowing their content to their areas of interest, giving the consumer a higher value experience.
Platform search algorithms also have a lot of other things going on, like the popularity of posts and posters, posting locations, the recency of posts, the likes and comments… and a generous dash of ‘special sauce’ so that the algorithms can’t just be outright manipulated by savvy influencers and their AI pets.
But, all that included, the Hashtag is as close to the golden ticket as there is in social media… particularly on Instagram.
For an author, a Hashtag is a bit like a book blurb. A good, catchy, relevant blurb might connect with the right readers. Generic, non-specific, poorly crafted blurbs are more likely to let readers slip away.
From what I read, there was no point picking Hashtags that were too generic or irrelevant to my material, but I equally didn’t want them too specific… other than #BlankPageToBookstore, which is obviously unique to me and a key part of my personal branding… and it looks cooler with the hash in front of it.
(Laughs…) agreed. How did you settle on your hashtags?
The usual culprits. ChatGPT, Google and Reddit. ChatGPT was particularly helpful. I described my content for each clip and asked for suggestions. Though, it did warn that I should change the hashtags up regularly to fine tune and keep them fresh for the platform algorithms.
The actual number of hashtags to use was a matter of much debate. Platforms like Instagram have a max of 30. TikTok has no max, but you are limited by description word counts. Many ‘experts’ recommended using all 30 hashtags for Insta. Others said that looks too desperate and you should choosing 3-4 very carefully chosen hashtags.
ChatGPT recommended 5-10. I landed on 10-15. I’ll probably tune that back as I go, but a thought casting a wide-ish net to start with felt like the right call. You can see my hashtag choices by going to my Instagram or Tiktok pages at the top of the page of my website above this blog. See what I did there.
Nice. Look at you go.
Thanks.
So, then you had, what was it, 6 clips on 3 platforms, named and hashtagged?
3 clips to start with… and just on Instagram… then I posted to TikTok and that was very similar if not even a little simpler. But then I posted the first few to YouTube shorts before realising that YouTube shorts has a max of 60 seconds and some of my clips run over the minute mark. I don’t know how I missed that one. My clips are not long enough for regular YouTube, but they are too big for YouTube shorts. That was when I scrapped YouTube and went back to Twitter/X.
I thought you scrapped Twitter/X earlier?
No. I was turned off earlier, but I hadn’t scrapped it fully yet?
Yet? What happened to close the deal?
I was getting ready to post a clip to Twitter and was deciding whether to post horizontal of vertical (you can do both on Twitter/X), and I thought I’d see what most people were doing first. So, I jumped onto my feed and had another look at the posts.
Let me guess, another fight video?
If only. What I saw was… literally indescribable. I am not even going to voice the details here other than to say that, within approximately a minute, I saw at least a dozen people murdered in half a dozen different… incredibly brutal… ways… many of them children.
And none of them were fakes as far as I could tell.
It was utterly horrifying. I honestly still feel traumatised. I have warned my entire family to stay off Twitter/X. I would recommend the same to anyone else.
I Googled my experience afterwards, and there are whole communities online offering each other support to cope with the traumatic things they have inadvertently seen on Twitter in the year since Elon Musk took over and sacked most of the workforce who were monitoring and filtering the platform’s content.
Just in case I seem like I am overreacting, I want to point out that I am far from prudish when it comes to violence. Some of my clips I made this week are quite dark in subject matter… war, depression, death. There is even a splatter of fake blood in one of them.
I have also written some fairly brutal fantasy and crime-fiction scenes. The difference for me is context. Violence that influences a characters motivations or drives a story arc is very different to me from gratuitous violence for the sake of the violence itself.
There was no context in my brief Twitter experience… just people doing genuinely terrible things to other people. Seemingly just a morbid celebration of the violence itself.
I don’t usually get into the whole good versus evil thing. I think most people have capacity for varying degrees of good and bad depending on the circumstances.
But… what I saw in that one minute on Twitter was as close to evil as I have ever witnessed. That there is a company allowing that… promoting that… glorifying that for profit… beggars belief.
I’ve been on Twitter for nearly ten years and have seen a few horrible things, but very rarely, and I’ve never seen anything as severe as what you’ve described.
I don’t know how much of your Twitter use has been recently, but apparently things have only degraded to this level in the past 12 months.
Are you sure you didn’t click on something weird by mistake?
I’m certain of it. That was the default feed after setting up my account. That is what anyone, of any age, of any background, would have seen if they had just signed up for a Twitter account. Needless to say, I have deleted Twitter off all my devices. I just wish I could delete this horrible stain on my subconscious as easily.
Are you okay to go on?
Yes, but let’s talk about something else.
Sure. Back to your posts on the other platforms. You have 3 of them posted on Instagram and Twitter now?
No, I’ve uploaded all 6 clips to both platforms. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I really feel like I’ve covered some serious ground this week. Even just being clear which 2 platforms I will be focusing on is a major milestone.
Did you need anything other than the videos, images, comments and hashtags to post your clips?
Not really. Though, it turned out that through the process, there were other decisions I needed to make around location data and whether people could download the clips and could use the music off the clips or use the clips as templates… and a few other things.
There are heated opinions online about the choices for every setting on each platform, but I just left everything to the defaults for now because most of them can be changed later if needed. Then I pressed share and… presto… a week’s work blipped to life on my Instagram feed… and then on TikTok after a similar set of steps.
So, how many thousand likes do you have so far?
What’s that now?
On your clips. How many thousand views and likes?
Oh. (Checks watch…) as of right now. That would be… ah… zero.
Okay. Zero thousands. How many hundreds?
(Shakes head…) before you go any lower, I have had zero views so far.
Ouch.
(Laughs…) that was pretty much the number I expected. Putting a clip on a social media platform is not much more than opening up your Google Drive to the public. No one is likely to stumble across your work by chance. I will need to milk the algorithms a lot more to get noticed.
You mean that whole SEO thing?
Yes, but in particular, I need to work with the algorithms the internal search engines on the social media platforms themselves follow. Comments and hashtags are all well and good, but nothing is likely to go viral because of a hashtag alone.
What sends things viral?
No one knows for sure or else everything would be viral… which means nothing would be. But, everyone knows there are a few key ingredients. The first… and arguably most important… thing is to have unique, preferably awesome, content. Then you need to get the attention of other… preferably already famous… platform users in the hope they will recommend or share or in some other way interact with you.
But that will only happen if they can find your stuff or if you go out of your way to contact them directly… usually by first following them and then liking their stuff and reaching out to them… or pay them money to shill your shiz.
I’m not planning to pay influencers at this point, so I need to learn a lot more about the algorithms to get my stuff served up to the right communities and individuals and then follow and like other people and their content that I genuinely connect with and… hopefully… someone ends up liking something of mine in turn.
That all seems very ah… organic.
If you mean slow, then yes, it does. But I sort of like that. I want to ease into this social media stuff and slow feels about right for now. I’m going to be very selective about who I follow and the content I like and comment on as well because I want to be part of real communities of real people… not just competing against AI bots to boost metrics.
The trick is, apparently, to find people at a similar point in their own journey… or only a little further ahead. The people with 5 million followers are probably not going to notice anything I do, but someone with 5 might. And they might end up with 5 million one day.
Anyway, none of that was the point of this week. This week was about making some content I was happy with and getting it up on some platforms.
So, do you feel like you have a clear social media strategy now?
Yes, I do. It’s strange to say that, having come from no plan or content or clue a week ago. My strategy is to create and post regular (initially weekly) content and to build ties to selected social media communities by following, liking and commenting on content of other people in those communities.
Then, as the book I end up writing for #BlankPageToBookstore starts to take shape, I will begin to tailor the social media content to the book… perhaps by animating key scenes or key aspects of the writing and publishing process… with the intent being to drive traffic to the website, leading up to the book release on Jan 1st 2025.
There is a fair bit of debate online about the effectiveness of social media driving web traffic and sales… but I honestly don’t care all that much. #BlankPageToBookstore has always been about my own learning and breaking down my own barriers. 3 followers and a book launch with a few friends and a cheese platter will be a success.
Great attitude.
Thanks. I made it myself.
(Laughs…) speaking of book launches. What’s up for next week on your journey from #BlankPageBookstore in 2024?
Glad you asked. Next week is about choosing the genre for the book and writing the premise.
These are always some of the toughest/biggest decisions, the very real foundation the book is built upon, but they are much more in my wheelhouse, so I’m looking forward to doing something a bit more in my comfort zone for a week or two.
Good luck with that. Let’s chat soon.
Thanks. Let’s.