I've just been asked about and recommended Emma's blog to a would be writer on Twitter - just saying.

Aw, thanks Essie!

Interesting piece by Sara Sheridan, on Why Writers Must Embrace Social Media:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh/2011/apr/14/edinburgh-sara-sheridan-digital-rights?CMP=twt_gu

Emma

what a good piece!

It is, isn't it. And it's always more convincing when it's by someone who starts out fairly sceptical, or just not getting it.

I'm always amused when you hear a pro- and an anti- discussing, say, smartphones; both sides talk as if it's all about the practicalities. But what's usually going on is that, at bottom, for the pro- person the fact that it's a shiny gadget that can do lots of clever things is inherently a plus, and that outweighs the fact that some of the clever things are really no more efficient than a well-chosen diary and a biro.

And for the anit- the gadgetness is inherently a minus and the gadget is going to have to be almost impossibly, vastly cleverer and easier than the diary and biro, before it'll outweigh the horridness of of it being a black box with buttons that don't say what they do on them.

'And best of all I've made some friends.' Me too - some wonderful friends, and our paths would never have crossed without Twitter. To have found people who like and do the same things as me,and who understand where I'm coming from, well that's more valuable than I can say.

I honestly don't think that the mainstream publishers really notice it when they're acquiring - except in cases where the book is directly related to the website/blog.

Yes, I get that impression too.

But I think it's hard for us (if we hadn't read Sara Sheridan's piece) to imagine the world out there who has NO CLUE about social media, who recoil in distaste at the idea of having a website, who don't understand what it's like. It's impossible to explain to someone who has no online life, how I can feel that I know lots of WriteWorders well or even really wel, who I've never met. But I do. So when publishers say, "It helps if a writer's on Twitter" they're trying to get through to that lot, not us, IYSWIM. If they're thinking of signing someone, then one thing that goes into the 'sign them' side of the scales is knowing that they're up for engaging in this stuff, which is undeniably where it's at (specially if you're writing YA or kid fic).

Plus, perhaps, they're just mentioning one of the list of many, many things which can make selling a book on from agent to editor to publicity/marketing/sales and on to the booksellers easier. That's a long list, and no one potential author is going to tick all of them. You can get depressed and hysterical (and not have time to make the book better) trying to Do It All: tweet and blog and have a column in Marie Claire and appear on Big Brother and scale Mount Everest and go to bed with Prince Harry and have a cool half-African background and a heart-breaking and redemptive story about tracing your birth mother and arrange a fatwa against yourself... Maybe it's the same as my agent said of a potential client being young and gorgeous: "I'd be lying if I didn't say that it makes my life easier in selling the book. But it is all about the book: that's what sells." And plenty of un-young and un-gorgeous authors get signed by agents and editors, including her...

Yes I think that's all very true Emma.

I definitely think it helps if you show you're keen and so on - and certainly my publisher made it pretty plain to me when we first met that they liked the idea that I was quite media savvy, and they wanted to support me in having a strong online presence.

But I think there's sometimes an impression given that a writer without a pre-existing "platform" is necessarily doomed when it comes to subbing agents and so on. I don't think that's really true.

Has the uses of Twitter for research been mentioned? I tweeted the need for an example of a piece of (preferably human) physiology that has evolved to do one thing, from a structure that originally did something else, and got twenty intelligent answers within an hour, complete with excellent links.

Though it helps that scientists have long been easily the most web-minded section of the population.

Emma