"The notion that such persons are gay of heart and carefree is curiously untrue. They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats."
- James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Making Googly eyes

There are a lot of ways to network these days. In ye olden times, when internet was but a wee tot, we had MySpace. Now there are so many ways to meet new cyber-people, I can barely list them all. We've got Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, chat rooms, and dozens more.

If you're an author who is trying to meet a lot of people to see if any of them would like to ultimately read one or two of your books, you could go crazy trying to keep your profile active on all these sites. I know. I used to try.

Ultimately, I settled on mostly Facebook with a touch of Twitter. I realize that should be the other way around, but Twitter is so fast-paced, I often feel like a cat chasing a laser. Now that I'm uber-comfy on Facebook, something new has popped into my view.

Google+.

They say Google+ is for the serious crowd, which means it should have automatically rejected me when I signed up, but it didn't. Here's the link to my Googly profile. I'm still learning to use it for good, not evil. I've already discovered one cool thing you can do: You can hang out.

Google+ Hangouts are a way you can video chat with people. You can even sign in and watch other people having a video chat, like taking a workshop. On Monday, I'll be interviewed on a Hangout called Indie Author TV with Jason Matthews and Marla Miller. Here's the link:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cednauk52ndcujijt7hb1g0g6r0

Jason is a self-published author, who has written both fiction and nonfiction, and is a very good interviewer. He was very savvy during our pre-interview checkout and asked a lot of great questions.

Marla is my pal from the Southern California Writer's Conference. She is a writer, editor, and professional problem solver for many writers. Talk about pointed and interesting questions - she's a whiz at getting to the meat of your story! Visit her website, Marketing the Muse, for more.

We'll be doing our interview at 6 p.m. on Monday (that's tomorrow, August 5th) and I hope you check it out. Don't worry if you have to miss it - it'll be on YouTube, and you can bet I'll be sharing that link!

1 comment:

Jason Matthews said...

I'll be there and encourage others to join or watch on YouTube later - Indie Authors #60. I'd also like to reiterate what Gayle said: we will be using Google Plus for good, not evil. That's a promise :)

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