 But the goal is to answer everyone. All right, so it's 1203. Shall we go ahead and get started? Let's do this. Great. All right, so hi. Welcome, everyone, to our discussion on how to build your book marketing platform and stay sane with Elizabeth Kaufman. My name's Taryn Edwards, and I manage the activities for writers at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco, which is steps away from Montgomery Bart Station. And it's a pioneering library, cultural event center, and chess club founded in 1854. All right, so just to let you know, this program will be recorded for future viewing. And by registering for and attending this program, you acknowledge that your name and your image may be included in the recording. Since we're using the webinar function, your cameras are turned off, but Taryn, Elizabeth, and Barbara's cameras are on. All righty, so this event, I'm thrilled to host. And it's been produced in partnership with the San Francisco Writers Conference and the San Francisco chapter of the Women's National Book Association, two entities with whom I work heavily to provide writing classes and other learning experiences relevant to the San Francisco Bay Area writing community at the Mechanics Institute. Today, our speaker is Elizabeth Kaufman, and she is the social media director for the San Francisco Writers Conference. She's also an editor for independent clients and for publishing companies. And she's also a rigorous writing coach, book coach. And she helps writers find their voices and connect with their creativity. So you can learn more about her at www.writingrefinery.com. And I also put her URL and email address at the beginning of the chat thread. We also have on camera Barbara Santos, who many of you know as marketing director of the San Francisco Writers Conference and the Writing for Change Conference. Barbara, quick question. Will Writing for Change happen? It will happen. Great. How it's going to happen is we're still working on it. All right, so the way the event today is going to work is Elizabeth will share a lot of her knowledge for about 10 minutes, and then we'll be in conversation with her to address your questions. So we have a pretty good sized audience today, so why don't you write your questions in the chat room? And as I said earlier, we will fold them into the conversation as naturally as possible, and we'll try to answer everyone. All right, thank you so much. Welcome, Elizabeth and Barbara. Thank you. Thanks for having us and me, especially. I'm so happy to be able to come and share with you guys just a little bit about what I see as a challenge that a lot of writers are facing right now, and that's how to build your marketing platform, your book marketing platform, and stay sane right now, because it's a crazy world we live in. So I'm actually going to start us off, if you don't mind. If everyone could just take a moment from where you're sitting to put your feet flat on the floor and put your hands in your lap and close your eyes and just take a breath. Breathe in deep all the way down into your belly. Hold it for a second, and then breathe out and open your eyes. And let's just all be here and be present right now. We're not going lots of places because we're in lockdown, but it's crazy times right now. And so just being able to take the space and breathe and be here is really important. And I hope you can feel that and just feel a little bit of grounding right now. So I'm just going to jump in really quick with my slides here, and we'll talk about how to build your book marketing platform and stay sane. So there are three different, of course, it's going to be, sorry, it's going to be cranky with me right now. I'm going to work with my technology here. And you guys know how this goes, right? You know the technology. The technology can be a pain. I don't know why you don't want to work with me. Slide show? Go to slide show? I'm not even seeing it. I'm just going to click up here. It's to, there we go. There we go. OK, so there are three different platforms that I wanted to talk about in general that are the highest trafficked platforms that we're using on social media these days. And that's Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And I'm going to assume that you're on at least one of these platforms already. And that is awesome because we need to be building that conversation and connecting with your readers wherever you can find them. So finding your audience, that is the most important thing that we're looking for right now. And if you're not seeing engagement on a particular platform that you've been on for a while, it might be time to pivot and try something new. So I just wanted to point out these three platforms and what types of content resonates there really quick. And then you can take time to consider for your particular subject matter, whatever that book is, whoever your ideal reader is, where you think they might be in the social media world. So we have Facebook, which is a little bit more short form writing. It's definitely meme driven. I don't know if when you look at Facebook, you see lots of different stuff that is being shared around that a lot of it is political. A lot of it is also then things to distract us from, things that are political. So if you're in the Facebook world, it's really based around that community idea, building those groups and talking to people about subjects that resonate with them and that are exciting to you or that are directly related to the things that you're writing about. Then we have Instagram, which is image driven, short form captioning. You can't spend too long writing out some of your manifesto on Instagram before it gets cut off. So people are less likely to read the captions if they're not captivated by the image that you're sharing with them. So you really want to think about, is the work that you're trying to market visual? Are you marketing an art book maybe? Or how can you represent the things that you're writing about in a visual way that will catch your potential reader's eye and then draw them in to want to follow you and have that conversation with you? And then we have Twitter. And Twitter has changed a lot in the past few years. Like it used to just be a stream of text and that was it, like you had 140 characters and it just kept like refreshing and new people were saying more things. And like you could only say so much in each tweet. And so then you had a string of tweets that would get your point across. But now they have video and image capabilities so there's a little bit more wiggle room to try and figure out how to communicate with your audience. But like I'm saying, each of these is a little bit different. And so being able to just take some time to play with a different platform that you haven't used yet can be really good right now because everybody is on the internet right now and everybody is shouting all at the same time. And so the idea is to figure out how to say something that's relevant and that will connect with your readers in the right place. So if you have this beautiful long post that you wanna share with people, your thoughts that you've been writing out probably Twitter is not gonna be the right platform for you. But that's, you can kind of work with each one of those and just see what's working and then change to something new if you need to get a better result. So pick one platform and then get really good at it. And then once you feel like you've mastered that you can move on to the next one. But definitely don't try to spread yourself thin and or be repeating content across mediums too much because again you're gonna draw a different kind of audience in different places. So you wanna iterate and you wanna stay as relevant as you can. And so then my main point that I like to share with people when I talk about building your social media platform is that I congratulate anybody who has thousands and thousands upon millions of followers on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever those platforms are. But all of those social media platforms should be a funnel for getting people to your website and onto your email list. Your email list is the only form of communication that you actually control to be able to share information and have conversation and connection with your readers. Facebook could decide to ban you for any reason at any time they don't have to have cause. It's their platform and their people who, their eyeballs, their audience that they're sharing with you. And it's nice that they give you algorithms and paid ways to connect with different people on that audience but it does not actually belong to you. So I'm just gonna harp on it a little bit as we go along but definitely make sure that you are drawing people back to your email list because that's where you have complete control over exactly how you wanna share with people. You can share frequent short emails, you can share super long, thoughtful, heartfelt emails, you can share videos however you want through your email delivery system. And those people that sign up unless they unsubscribe like they're your eyeballs to look at and to share with and to listen to and be in dialogue with. So because the world is so weird and inconsistent right now I just wanna point out that consistency is most important. And like figuring out what you can do and that you can maintain over the long haul is gonna be important as well because if you send a flurry of posts or emails or whatever it is right now and then you don't say anything for months that is gonna confuse your audience or you may have people that unsubscribe from your email list because you sent like 20 emails in one week when that's not like how you're gonna communicate with people regularly. And also like maybe you feel like you have tons of time to be posting right now or to be emailing people but like when life goes back to whatever the new normal looks like you wanna be able to maintain that pace of communication. So taking that time to stop and breathe and know yourself and know what makes you happy and how you when you add more responsibilities or more activities to your list you're gonna be able to maintain that is important. And then I just wanted to say that like knowing what you're talking about, what your voice is, what your message is to your readers and to the world through your art, through your creative practice, through the books that you're writing that is the most important. So it's possible that you could dive in and capitalize on some perceived opportunity but you're gonna lose part of that audience over time if it's not the content that is actually like authentically resonating with you and who you are. So just keep thinking about that as you're building your audience that you're trying to organically cultivate a readership that is connected to you and to the things that you're interested in so that as you continue to share they continue to be interested. There's also just like a side note in here like you could buy as many followers as you want for whatever platform that exists. There are ways to do that. And so then you could perhaps go to a publisher and say, ta-da, I have a hundred thousand followers on Twitter, look at my platform but none of those followers are gonna be actual like engaged and interested members of your community, they're just numbers on the page. So sharing content that is relevant to what you're writing about and to what you care about and to what your readers care about is the most important thing and doing that consistently and being engaged with your audience is what counts. And this is the main points that I wanna make and that is again that it takes time. You can't just overnight have success. Some people can maybe but there's like this, it's like that weird confluence of all the right things happening at the right time to shoot skyrocket somebody into fame and for most of us it's going to be one reader at a time, one follower at a time, you welcome them in and say, awesome, we're so glad you're here and here's how we're gonna connect together. So if you feel like your numbers are going slowly, I just wanna stop and encourage you that that's exactly how it's gonna go and it's exactly right and you're doing the work. And then next, your book is not for everyone. So if you have people that follow you and then decide to unfollow you, try not to take it personally because it's not about you really, it's about people having lots of different interests and lots of different voices all shouting at them at the same time and eventually you have to be able to curate to this and not this. I have time for this and not this. So your book will not be for every single person and that's totally okay because you're building your audience. So the best gift you can give is to stop trying to please everyone and to talk about the things that you care about and tune out the rest of the noise and take that time to build each individual, I don't wanna say, to build what you're trying to say in such a way that your readers keep coming back to you again and again and are excited to be able to like have that connection and to learn more about the things that you're interested in. So the last couple of slides I have here and I can just share these as we go along or I can email the slides to anybody who's interested in it later but I have some thoughts here on how to cultivate yours then when you're not feeling creative or motivated and how to practice self-care and boundaries around social media because it bleeds into everything. So these are just a few ideas for you when you're not feeling creative or motivated to reach out and I'm just gonna take a quick second to tell you that like at the beginning of this lockdown in March, everybody was all of a sudden in a panic and like worried about how to respond or like what to do and there were a lot of people that jumped into that space with leadership and like how to like cultivate things and how to encourage people and how to like build that creative practice or do this or do that and I being the writing coach that I am I felt like I should really be doing that too but also at the beginning of the lockdown, I got sick and I was sick for like three weeks with this horrible cold, it was really not good and so I did not feel at all like reaching out and I felt bad about myself for not doing it and then I remembered that, oh yeah, I need to take care of myself first and then once I feel better then I'm able to reach out or once I feel better and then I'm able to create more so I just wanted to offer that to you guys as well even though we've been in this space now for a couple of months and we're starting to feel like there's some kind of routine going on maybe some of us hopefully that like you still need to check in with yourself and make sure that if you're feeling resistance drink some water, take a break, go for a walk try something new and hopefully that'll inspire you to find some more content to create and be able to share with the people that have signed on willingly to be part of your community and want to hear from you and then my last slide is just here for how to practice self-care and boundaries around social media and this ties back into part of that staying sane while you're building your platform you're trying new platforms you're trying different things you're trying different frequencies of sending things out but like your social media and marketing and your platform that is not the purpose of your life that is a thing that you do to support the purpose of your life which is to create your art so if you don't wanna feel sucked in by it I recommend that you give yourself a time limit every day that you put it on your calendar that for 30 minutes I'm gonna work on sending out my Instagram posts or making you know liking other people's posts or sharing stuff on Facebook or whatever it is that you're going to do but give yourself a time limit and don't go beyond it that way you can have that compartmentalized time and you're doing what you need to do each day and being regular about it but you're also not like getting sucked in and doing it for hours on end which can happen because that's what like social media wants you to keep your eyes on them and not on the other things that you're working on so give yourself a time limit plan a schedule of posts in advance if you can so that you can either use a scheduling tool to be able to send those out or you can just wake up in the morning and say I know what I'm sending today and put it out there and that way you're not spending a whole lot of time each day thinking about what it is that you will need to post for that day turn off your notifications like there's really not usually a need for Facebook to have your attention all the time like it does not need to make your phone buzz it does not need to jump up and tell you that so-and-so liked your post you that's one more way that like they bleed into the rest of your day so turn off your notifications and then when you're during your scheduled time you can go on to your app and look at whatever it is that you want to and then I say use block mute and unfriend liberally like it's fine in some platforms you can people can follow you and you don't have to follow them back so that you can curate your feed but like you don't there are certain things that you don't need to have coming up in your feed or into your direct messages all the time and so like you are not required to provide that kind of access to yourself through social media either so be selective about who it is that gets to join you and like have access to you and make sure that you set up guidelines for how people are supposed to behave and boundaries for how people are supposed to interact with you and then you can maintain those with the use of these tools so that's the end of my slides and I wanted to know, I'm guessing there are some questions I think I could see some of that coming up in there so I'm going to start. I just wanted to say the advice you gave at the end about blocking and setting limits and boundaries I thought that was really great and very timely advice. Yeah, yeah. All right, well we have a lot of questions here. Good. Let's see, let me scroll up here and see what we've got. One question from Justine, she wanted to know if there was a particular demographic that you can kind of associate with the various platforms. She wants to know, in her experience she sees a lot of older folks on Facebook and she's just wondering if that's... Yeah, that was what you experienced. You're going to find probably that 18 to 50, 60 some on Instagram, that's that kind of age range that's there and then a lot of people that are 16 above on Facebook, there was an article I was just reading the other day that broke down the numbers for that and if I can find it, I can email it to people who are interested in seeing those numbers up front but that's definitely true that if your audience is in an older and above 60 demographic, then you're probably like looking to find them on Facebook and not on Twitter. Twitter is a little bit fast paced in that kind of way. So, somebody says, yes, she'd like that article so awesome, I'll write down to be able to send it to you. Great, Kate was wondering what service you use to integrate video onto Facebook or onto your other social media streams? Well, so in Facebook and Instagram, especially you have, they have video capabilities built right in so then you can, if you wanna create a video on your phone or on your computer, however you want, you can post that directly to those platforms. Instagram is different from Facebook in that regard. Facebook, I don't know what the time limit is on videos. On Instagram, if you're going to put something in a feed, you get one minute of video. You can use stories and get a little bit longer, it just breaks it into chunks and then they have Instagram TV where you can, they call it IGTV, and you can post really long videos there if you want to. And then you can share a clip of it into your Instagram feed so that people who are looking and scrolling through can find that and then go to IGTV to watch the rest of your video. It's kind of like a teaser. Yeah, go ahead. You finish. Oh, I was just gonna say if you are using, if you're talking about like using email to send videos to people or that kind of thing, you will wanna check with the particular email provider that you're using, like if I'm using MailChimp, they have, I think, a way to integrate YouTube videos and your main problem is really figuring out where you're hosting all of the videos that you are sending to people, whether you're hosting that on a private server or whether you're hosting those videos on YouTube or some other paid service like Vimeo or whatever that you can put there and then add in those kind of integrations into your email to send to people. But yeah, so that's the hardest part is knowing cause I mean, you know, probably all too well, just like I do that your iPhone, sure it has tons of storage and also it's super limited. Videos take up a lot of space and so then like getting those out and off into the hands of people who are interested in them is the important part. And then I mean, that's why YouTube is such a popular venue for people is that they can host their videos elsewhere. You mentioned earlier about the importance of not relying just on social media to develop a following but to use social media to channel it into your personal website and your personal email list and all of that. Cindy had a question on, I guess on Facebook and Twitter you can include your own personal website but on Instagram, she says that you can't and she was wondering if there's a tool or what sort of strategy you would use to drive traffic from Instagram to your website. Yeah, so you do in your profile on Instagram have space to put a link but you only get to put one link on Instagram. And so I use two things. One, I use in the captioning on Instagram and you have a call to action, right? Like anytime you're doing, like whether you're sending an email or like putting a post onto Facebook you have a call to action at the end of it whether it's for people to respond and answer a question or to sign up for something on your email. So when you say that in Instagram, you can't, you're right, you can't have a direct link listed there but you just, most people say the link is in the bio. And so then what that indicates to anybody who's reading that is to click through to your profile and see the link that's there. And so you can change that link, you know all the time, anytime, however you want to but if you're somebody who has regularly different offerings going at once that you'd like to be able to have people access there's a program that you can use the free version or you can I think pay for upgraded features that's called link tree. And I'm gonna put that in the chat for people. It's called link tree. And mine, I use link tree for my websites and actually use it for the San Francisco Writers Conference Instagram as well which if you're not following us you should come follow us San Fran Writers. We'd love to see you there. But link tree will give you a custom URL that when people click on that it takes them to a few different selection choices. So then you can change those links out whenever you want to or add more and it can be a really long list if you want to of sign up for my newsletter or check out this free video that I made or download this packet for writers that kind of thing is all listed in there. And so that's how people are getting around the you can only have one live link and it only goes on your bio on Instagram. Oh, that was a thorough answer. You're my best. Elizabeth earlier when you first started your slideshow you mentioned the importance of curating your social media audience but what about curating your posts? Yeah. Did you really, Rick had a question asking how much duplication should you really have on Twitter and Facebook for example? I mean you kind of want to show your voice and show your personality in each stream but you also want it to be different and authentic. How much is too much as far as duplication? So I think you can get away with it a little bit but knowing that like, so if you are connecting to the same audience like the same people exactly on Twitter and on Instagram or Facebook then like that's it feels like a little bit like you're doing I guess too much work even though like if you're using Buffer you can put the same post in three places with one click and that's nice to be able to do that and we can talk about that again in a second but there's different types of information that get more activity on each of those platforms and that's really what I'm talking about. It can all lead back to the same idea and the same blog post or the same whatever it is that you want to talk about that is away from Twitter or Facebook but like on Twitter, the picture that you post on Instagram is not gonna, it won't size right and won't feel and work as well. So you just need to be able to, you can have the same ideas even and how you put it onto that platform changes a little bit but then also how you expect people to interact with you on that platform may change as well where like in Facebook, you tend to see lots of like comment interaction and that kind of thing people having conversations and Twitter it's a little bit harder. It happens but it happens in a different manner so like just being able to again note that the long post that you wanna put on Facebook is not really gonna translate to Twitter or to Instagram even. So like just being able to be aware of that. And that'll kind of help you decide what sort of persona you wanna have on Facebook versus Twitter. Like if you wanna like Rick mentioned ask how much of his posts should be about personal interest versus books and how his privacy settings should be set but it sounds like there's no one answer it just depends on what you want out of the social media experience as well. Yeah and again you're looking to connect with your readers so personal interests are great to share as long as they're gonna be the same personal interests that your readers share and they have to do with the things that you're writing about. But that's actually why like that's why you see a lot of separation between people's personal Facebook page and their business Facebook page, right? Like that way you have that separation of like the people that are in my business Facebook feed they are there because they connect to me over the things that I write about and the things that I write about interest me because of this and they also interest the people that are reading my books. But those people there that are your book readers most of the time like sharing pictures of your kids or grandkids or the food that you ate that night like that's not necessarily good fodder for building your following for your business. It's fun to share that with your family and with your friends but for the people that are buying your book there's like a little bit more separation that needs to happen there. The people that can share their kids and what food they're eating right now and that stuff they're like the upper tier we'll call them of people who have billions of followers and everybody knows who they are anyways. Like Neil Gaiman, he can post anytime he wants about his kids or about like what, you know except for that I think he eats Marmite and I'm like not a big fan of that so he can just keep that to himself. But like, you know that kind of thing it's fine because he's super famous already. But when he was starting out before he got super famous he had to be a little bit more targeted in what he's talking about to his social media audience or his email audience or whatever to make it relevant to their interests almost more than it is relevant to yours. It's just, you're looking for that overlap. That's a great answer. Particularly when you're tempted to share some sort of political thing. Right, yes. And we're all being sorely tested these days because there's so much to talk about and think about. How many things you could comment on? You're like, nope. No. Nada has a question about how to get Twitter followers to be aware of what her handle is. So basically when you're building actually Kathy Turni has a great book on how to build a Twitter following that you should Google her. She's on Instagram, Kathy Turni, Kathy of the Sea. Look that up. And, but like basically what you're doing when you're on Twitter and you're trying to find followers is you follow people. And Twitter is good at like you give it like different topics that you're interested in and it will suggest followers for you. And so then you just get out there and you start following people and when you are writing about specific topics you do some research to find out if there's a hashtag that is relevant to the topic that you're writing about include that because when you do that then you show up in that feed for that hashtag. And so anybody who clicks on that hashtag can see all the tweets that have come out that are on that subject. Twitter is hard if you're looking for like when you're just starting out especially if you're looking for that connection and conversation because when you're just starting out like you just have like so it feels like everyone is shouting and like they're all saying things and they're like the feed just goes by so quickly that it can just feel really overwhelming. But the point with Twitter especially is just like to be doggedly consistent about the things that you are the topics that you're posting on. And again, avoid the personal stuff of like I ate this or I these things or here's a picture of my cat although there is a hashtag cats of Twitter. So if you wanna be like talking to people about cats then by all means and I do that with my personal Twitter feed actually not my work one but my personal one. So if you wanna see pictures of my cat you can follow me at fairbeddy on Twitter. And yeah, so it's definitely it's more about like getting out there and engaging and answering people's questions or talking to other people or about topics that other people are talking about on Twitter. And then you can also share in like on Facebook with your friends there and just remind people that hey, you're on Twitter and you would love more followers and share your Twitter handle there for people. Elizabeth, you mentioned using a social media manager and you mentioned Buffer. Is Hootsuite out and Buffers in? I keep hearing more about Buffer. It's so many different things. Hootsuite is actually really cool but I'm pretty sure that the free version of Hootsuite is not as great as the free version of Buffer. And I like to use things for free as much as I can until you like hit that point where you really need like that much more management of the posts that you're putting out into the world. Like being just using the free service is so much easier. And again, Buffer has a really great free service available. Great answer there. Let's see, Darcy has a question. What do you think about using? Oh, she had a question about a separate personal page and then an author page, but maybe we've answered that in terms of how that is. Well, what do you think about how having separate pages will dilute your followers and divide your pool of followers is the words Darcy uses. Yeah, so it's kind of like hard to explain, I guess, but the idea would be that you are, like if you're gonna talk about books, you put on your author hat and you go to your author page and do that. And you have to train your followers, I guess on your friends on Facebook that I'm gonna talk about my author stuff over here and like direct them over there. And then it becomes about curating that space, right? Like so that when you're posting on your personal Facebook page it's for your friends and family as opposed to your author page which is for your book audience. And the hope being that you have people in your book audience that are not your friends and family. And I know Facebook blurs the lines on everything, all kinds of friendship, right? So I have thousands of friends on Facebook, yay. But do I know most of them personally? No, it's like we're connected through the book world and that's what I use Facebook for now. I actually don't have my literal friends and family on Facebook anymore because it just wasn't working for me. But because Facebook has an interest in who's paying for ads and who's paying for different kinds of services on their site like just posting your author related material through your personal Facebook feed is not guaranteed to get you the audience that you would want. You can't really manage who is seeing those posts and you definitely can't see any kind of analytics on who's engaging with it except for like, oh, like so many people liked this but if you wanted to know who's clicking through your links or how far the reach is for your particular post you don't get any of that analytics on a personal page. Whereas if you have that business page then you do have access to those analytics and you can use the tools that they have there as well to boost your reach to other audiences and draw more people in. And again, I'm just gonna go back to like Facebook is great and lots of people are on it and using it and also Facebook owns all of those people that are on there and using it. So if you want the assuredness of being able to communicate with your audience you wanna train them to go from that author page on Facebook from your personal page to your author page to your email because then you get that access to them. What do you think of using Freebie Giveaways to draw in new audiences? I mean, I absolutely agree with that. I actually am working on my own Freebie for people to offer in the next couple of weeks I'm putting together an author creative, creative wellness toolkit for people who are interested in signing up for my email list to be able to send you add that kind of information about not information inspiration let's reframe that a little bit for how to take care of yourself and fill your creative well so that you're able to do that important creative work. And so I definitely, definitely think having something to give away for free is hugely important in getting people to sign up and then being able to keep delivering valuable content is the way to keep people with you. And you just, you could duplicate those efforts on your start on your website and then share that on Facebook and share that via social media. Yes. Great, okay. So what do you think of medium and using that as a promotional tool? Is that really social media or is that a news source like salon.com? I mean, yeah, it is technically social media because even salon is technically social media, HuffPost, all of that is social media until you get to the people that are actually the paid journalists like everybody else is just editorial like whatever it is that we have to say maybe experts on things but it's not like our journalistic like outlet. We're just, you know, it's a platform that you can use. And so I would say if you have the creative space to be able to use medium and like grow your audience that way they do have a larger audience that you can be connected to. But again, like medium owns that audience. And I'm not sure I would have to read their user agreements but like they may own the content that you put out there as well. So like you really wanna be conscious about what it is that you're sharing there. And then again, use it as another tool to drive people back to your email list and to your own personal website where you're sharing exclusively content that is relevant to those people. Okay, I guess it all comes down to who owns what. And that's really something to think about when you're writing original content and putting it on social media. It's yeah, it's the same with Facebook and with Instagram had a thing it's been a number of years now but where they were talking about like who owns the images that are on Instagram and whether they Instagram has a right to use them in promotional material and basically you sign away your rights to any of the content that you're putting up there. And sure, you get to have it in your feed and that's yours. Somebody else, a user of Instagram can't come and steal that from you but if Instagram wants to use it. It was a big deal. Yeah, yeah, no, it's something you don't really think about but it's so important to keep in mind to own your work unfortunately you'll have to pay for that in terms of having your own website and your own URL but it's really important. Now, crowd management. Do you have any thoughts on how to tactfully get out of a follower relationship? So I'm gonna guess that it's turned contentious to follower relationship and honestly like what it comes down to depending on how the story is being told like if you need to block somebody or unfriend somebody or whatever you need to do like you have the freedom and ability to do that at any time that is totally on you to be able to do that. And if it's public enough that like other people might have questions about it you can open if you wanna open up dialogue for people to be able to talk to you about like what happened and like the steps that you took so like or what your policies are in general because like you get to decide it's your house and your rules. So like if people wanna come play they as long as they know what the rules are and can abide by you know then they can choose to abide by them or not but if they don't abide by the rules see ya. That's my thought. I'm like so not there for you know like massaging any kind of that stuff anymore. I'm just like no thank you. There are enough trolls on the internet that I'm like if you wanna you know you can find somebody to like go and have the same opinions with it but if we disagree and it's gonna be that contentious then it's over it's okay. Right what do you think about LinkedIn? I think it can be useful but it definitely depends on what you're writing about. And so then who your audience is right? If you're writing business books I think LinkedIn is probably amazing. I honestly don't use LinkedIn at all because it's super invasive. It sends me too many emails and like too many notifications and I just was like this is driving me bananas. So like I think I still have a profile out there with them but like I never go on there and look at it but the people who are again the people who are active on LinkedIn can really make use of that. So if you feel like that's where your audience is then I would say give it a go and if you're not seeing results though like then it's okay to put it aside and try something different. So the whole idea is to experiment and if you wanna use LinkedIn for a while and you're like getting no interaction with any of the posts that you're putting out there it might be time to try something different. That is a great answer. I always think of LinkedIn as being a place where you engage with people who are looking to employ or if you're trying to get employed or if you're trying to make professional associations with others in your same profession. For some reason I just don't think of it in terms of a creative outlet so much as maybe Facebook or Instagram or some of the more. Well I guess like if you're writing books for people on how to cultivate your resume or your business networks like I think those kind of things are definitely resources that if that's what you wanna write about then LinkedIn is a place you could put that information and people will pick it up because again they're looking for business networks and to find a new job and to work on their resume and figure out how to like impress more people or whatever and that is that kind of venue. So again it's like knowing which audience is where. That's great advice for all of us. Are there any other questions? Have we answered everything to your satisfaction? I've missed a lot of food for thought. I know I'm kind of dizzy with it all. Thinking oh dear I've broken so many rules already. I'm sorry to tell you Sharon but Richard is handling an issue over here so I've got things turned down that's why I'm not talking. Oh okay. Let's see Rick has a question about how to connect with different groups on Facebook. Yeah. I just always use a keyword search but. For sure that's what I was gonna say is like search for keywords that are related to the groups you're thinking about joining and then like depending on what you're joining the groups for you have to be aware of the rules that each particular community has for engagement because not every group that you go into is gonna be really excited about you promoting your own stuff there and in general I feel like that's a lot of places really don't like to hear self promo stuff but they do like to hear people promoting the work of others and so like that is the kind of thing that I mean again you just need to be aware of what the culture is of the group that you're getting involved in. That's some good advice for all of us to pay attention to the etiquette of any community that you're into. Sense the tone. Sense the tone. I know I get to ask this question a lot is it worth it to hire someone to do your social media for you? It depends on two factors. One, how much time you think it's gonna take for you to get it done and if you have that time to spare or not and then two, how much of your voice needs to be ingrained in the things that you're posting. So like it's possible that you could hire somebody to like take the posts that you've curated and that you've written already and to load them into Buffer or directly onto Facebook or Instagram or whatever and have somebody do that mechanical part. It does get a little harder for an individual to be able to have that voice accurately translated if somebody else is writing their posts for them. So it's something to think about and like figure out what works but it's not always, if you don't want it to sound like everybody else that's out there sharing the same meme or the same quote or the same images then it's still important for you to be involved there. So. Let's see, Kate Ferrell has a question about video interviews or conversations. Do you like this style where we have a conversation or do you prefer the single person presentation for when you are trying to share your knowledge? Personally, I like the conversation. I definitely thrive off of that back and forth interaction and when I'm watching someone else speak as well like there's, it takes a lot of talent to be able to write and present something that lasts more than like 20 minutes. Last more than three minutes sometimes, right? Like being able to get to your point and like say your point and deliver that much information. So like having two people together to be able to play off of each other and have that conversation. I just, I feel like I connect more to what's being said in that kind of way than if somebody is just filtering information to me. So. Right, you gotta see the faces. Yeah, I do. All right, well, we're at one o'clock. Are there any last minute questions before we say goodbye to Elizabeth and give her a great round of applause? Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This was very fun. It was, thank you. And thank you everyone for making do with the webinar format. I appreciate it. It's all such a great learning experience. Well, thank you, Elizabeth. I certainly learned a lot and I am just now thinking how I can calendar in a review of my marketing strategies. Put it on the calendar and maybe give yourself, you know, doesn't need to be hours, just 30 minutes every day to like do a little review. Yeah, that's great advice. All right, well, thank you everyone for attending and Barbara as always for organizing this and I look forward to connecting with all of you. Face to face and virtually. Yeah, Nina Amir is next week. That'll be awesome. Yes, yes, Nina Amir is next week. You can register for that at milibrary.org and Nina will be talking about mindfulness and getting into a writing practice. All right, look forward to seeing you all. Thanks Elizabeth and Barbara and I hope that you get some writing done today. Thank you. All right, bye-bye. Bye.