A couple of weeks ago I deactivated my Ditchwalk Twitter account. All I have felt in the aftermath is relief.
A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.
Currently many people believe that Facebook and Twitter are central to an author’s platform because of the size of those online communities. But joining Facebook or Twitter merely allows the opportunity to start building, managing and marketing to the communities segregated on those sites. All of the work still needs to be done by you, often under terms and conditions no one in their right mind would otherwise submit to.
Facebook constantly made me feel like a sucker so I dropped it — and have never regretted doing so. Twitter, with its more fluid and simple conversational focus, never felt like a con game, but over time the potential and benefit of the site narrowed and faded. In the end I felt the time I allocated to using and managing Twitter could be more profitably spent in other ways. As I hope the remainder of this post attests, this was not a conclusion I came to rashly. [ Read more ]