The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns: Social Media

(Morguefile photo.)




In social media, at some point the Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns comes into play.

You make a bunch of friends and get a bunch of followers. You post a few links. No one knows who you are, and they’re curious about what you have. Some will click on the link and have a look. Maybe you sell a few books or widgets, or whatever.

So you click on a few more people, and get a few more friends and followers, and you keep on posting, keep on tweeting, and maybe a few more books or grapple-grommets go out the door.

Now you are convinced this is a good thing, and so you keep on doing it. We must be aware that these are not really personal relationships. That’s not to say that we can’t make some new relationships with people. But it just isn’t that easy, and in fact, plenty of other people are doing the same thing for the same reasons. A spammer will always follow you back, incidentally.

Does it work?

If you post and tweet like crazy, at some point people tune you out. They ignore you. And so you try to build up your list of followers, which takes time.

When you are following a couple of thousand people on Twitter, just try to read all the posts. Try to read a posted link, perhaps some blindingly brilliant article on social media, and then when you go to re-tweet it, you’ve forgotten where it came from. The post has disappeared at the bottom of the page or column. You can’t remember their name.

Now imagine you are someone with a few thousand followers of their own, and they might be trying to read and or re-tweet your posts.

What did I learn today?

I learned today that Twitter hash-tags mean nothing on LinkedIn, where the majority of users do not use Twitter. If you tweet something and cross-post to LinkedIn, people there can re-tweet, but they can’t share it or comment on it in LinkedIn. They hang out on LinkedIn for a very special reason: they don’t like Facebook and Twitter so much…too much spam.

The solution there is to post directly to LinkedIn, right? Unfortunately this easy answer might not work for you. I got a notification that I would no longer be able to cross-post from Twitter to LinkedIn. I wondered if this was a new policy, but the more likely scenario is that someone reported me for spamming, and I have been cut off.

I have a guy who used LinkedIn to send me a message every day for months to my e-mail account inbox. I let it go on for months. Then I went into LinkedIn, and made sure it would not happen again. Maybe he believes that e-mail campaigns work, and some say that they do.

Those who make it work are not in the inbox every stinking day, talking about the same stinking book, every single stinking time.

I’ve always been leery of e-mail campaigns, as I’m not convinced that the small number of sales that you might get will outweigh the badwill (the opposite of goodwill) that you are far more likely to get. Just to clarify, I don’t hate the guy. But my inbox is full enough at the best of times, and at the worst of times I have spent three hours out of a busy day just going through my e-mails. All those Twitter follower notifications, and all those LinkedIn group conversation notifications…I’m spending far too much time checking and deleting crap that I don’t have time for.

On Facebook, you can be friends with someone, and yet how do you know whether or not they have blocked your posts? They haven’t un-friended you. You can comment on one of their posts.

“Oh, yeah,” they say. “I remember that guy.” Then they click like on your comment and you are none the wiser—you just had an ‘interaction’ with them so you don’t know any different.

As an experiment, I am strongly tempted not to post a product link for a solid month, just to see what happens.

Now, a person I was reading earlier says that the less they post, the more they sell. I’m not sure that will be true in my case. They may have books much higher up the rankings than mine are.

They might be figuring prominently in Amazon’s ‘also bought’ and ‘also viewed’ customer presentations. As long as they are selling a lot of books, they will continue to be presented.

Another worthwhile experiment might be to only post my own blog, and to only re-tweet interesting posts, or to actually engage in actual conversations, which is theoretically what Twitter is for. I don’t see too many people who do that, with a few exceptions. The ‘chats’ on Twitter are interactive. I’m a little shy about jumping in there when I don’t know anybody, when I haven’t read the book, et cetera, but it’s better than being blocked or ignored.

It took me a very short time to realize that people re-tweet you because they want you to re-tweet them. This is not possible if you can’t remember the exact configuration of their handle, and if you simply can’t find them again—that’s why the notifications in your inbox are so ‘useful.’

The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns applies elsewhere.

The law of rapidly diminishing returns also applies as a site grows. This seems to be true of Smashwords. When I signed up and published my first two e-books, there were only 12,000 authors on there. And I did see a limited number of daily page views for my books. Now there are probably over 44,000 authors on there. And I don’t seem to be getting any page views at all for some books, which maybe haven’t sold a copy in a while, and the sheer number of other books has drowned them out.

My gut instinct tells me that this law of rapidly diminishing returns works in some form or another in any social situation, whether it’s online or for real. People ignore Coke commercials. They ignore any commercial that isn’t relevant to their exact needs at that exact time. In fact, people buy devices that drop commercials when they record something to watch later.

Subliminally, maybe such advertising has an effect, but it’s costly and takes a very long time to have any effect. Even that is subject to, ‘The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns.’

Anything else is just a con-job. To a certain extent, we are conning ourselves, and when we’re doing all the talking, it’s easy to convince ourselves. Even that is only going to work for so long.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and this article sort of helped as well.

Hints and Tips
 
Now, if you want the re-tweet, the ‘RT’ as we say, make your posts a little shorter. That’s because I want to put it like this:

RT @JoeSomebody999 and then your post, and it all has to fit in 140 characters. That way Joe knows I RTed him and maybe he will reciprocate.

Do good covers sell bad books?

Do good covers sell bad books? I don’t know, but the book with what I consider to be the best cover seems to sell the fewest books. My best seller has a good cover, but another best seller has a ‘bad’ one. What this should tell us is that the product description, the subject matter, and above all, the genre has a lot to do with it.

Maybe a reader's preference cannot be 'gamed.'

People have loved mystery since its inception about 150 years ago. The Red Baron is a popular character, from WW I history buffs to people who liked Snoopy. What the heck is a weird western? This might be a very tight little sub-genre, with a good number of very loyal readers, but first I have to crack the door open, and there is no guarantee that it is a good book by the standards of those who actually read the genre.

Comments are always welcome.

The Writer's Rules of Engagement.

(Morguefile) The author is a big fan of Luc Besson, and films like 'The Professional,' (hence the milk,) and 'The Fifth Element.'


Here are the rules of engagement for writers.

Money flows towards the author, not away from them. Otherwise, it's just vanity publishing. While the industry is in a state of flux, and the situation is such that major publishers have fewer and fewer production slots for new and unproven writers, to blow big chunks of cash in the hope of beating the odds is a kind of vanity publishing. And in my opinion, Amazon is the king of vanity publishing.

How many times have I heard it?

“Get yourself a good editor.” A good editor might cost you $2.00 a page, or it might cost you $35.00 an hour. Either way, it adds up pretty quick and this cost will have to be recouped by sales of your book. The more books you write, the more your costs go up. People are writing 40,000-word young adult books in three days, and then they spend a lot of money trying to make this work.

Amazon and other service providers want you to do this of course, because they have no gate-keeping system in place to ensure quality. Much has been written about ‘spam’ books put together by copyright-free, license-free content skimmers. What I would suggest here is ‘buyer beware.’ I would also say, ‘author beware,’ because people who figure out that they got ripped off will remember your name.

“Pay for a proofreader.” If you use spell-check and grammar check, they will not catch all errors. However, they will catch 99 % of them, which is close to industry standard, and you can pick off the rest by carefully reading and re-reading your manuscript four or five times. Learn to write clean copy the first time around, and you will save yourself a lot of money. Also, the average self-published author sells less than $500.00 worth of books. Don’t load up your book with a lot of overhead before you even start.

“Pay for formatting.” Use the Smashwords Style Guide, read the Amazon formatting FAQs, or grab a free copy of a book by a professional author during a promotion and learn this simple and valuable skill on your own and for yourself. At some point, you will be good enough that you can begin offering a service to other authors, and this might be a valuable revenue stream. If nothing else, you will save a lot of money over the course of time. Right now, I have ten or eleven books in the Smashwords Premium Catalogue, and I formatted them all myself. If each one cost $50.00, I saved $550.00. This cost does not have to be bought and paid for out of book sales. It makes it easier to make a profit. I also have four PODs on CreateSpace, and these files are also used to upload books to Lulu.com. There may be other free service providers out there, and most likely there will be more coming along very soon. So I saved another few hundred there, and with more PODs in the works, more savings will ensue. Any good businessman will tell you that a dollar saved is a dollar earned in profit. Ben Franklin said it too.

“Pay for a professional marketing image.” This is a tough one to argue against, but here goes anyway. You can download copyright-free, license-free images from websites like Morguefile. You can learn to use Photoshop, or Paint.NET, or Nero Photosnap, and come up with marketing images that rival professional images. Work on it for an hour a day for a few days. Don’t settle for the first one you come up with. I often go through ten or twelve images before publishing. If I come up with a better one, I upgrade my image. My first covers were admittedly crap. Now look at them, for example this one for 'On the Nature of the Gods.' Not only that, they can have the stamp of individuality that is lacking in many of these images. Without getting too heavy here, your individuality is your brand, and quite frankly, there are a lot of clone covers out there. Until July 27/12, you can use coupon code WM65R and get 25 % off the cover price on all e-book formats from Smashwords for 'On the Nature of the Gods.'

My only costs to date are internet service, and I have the cheapest service I can get. I pay about $30.00 a month, and with a little Hollywood accounting, it goes under my personal expenses as entertainment. That’s because I don’t have a TV set, and I spend a lot of time on the internet. It is my only real form of entertainment, and since I love my job, that’s okay.

Another cost is in ordering proofs from Createspace. I only order one proof. If I need changes, I use the digital proofer, but I have the book in my hand to prove to my own satisfaction that there is nothing else in the book that needs changing. As an example, I read ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery,’ and there were exactly three small changes, none of which were formatting. They were typos. This meets or exceeds industry standards, and it also meets or exceeds the standards met by all those other authors who paid a lot of money for services the experts are telling you are essential. Case closed.

Do not pay for promotion, or blog hops, or whatever. Swap blog posts with friends for free if you must. No one has proven to my satisfaction that they actually work, or justify their cost in any way, shape or form. Do not pay for Twitter followers. Walk away from anyone charging fees to use their service platform. There are a lot of them, and lots of people will tell you they work. But if someone is actually selling a few books, they may be erroneously convinced that a certain technique or strategy worked when really it didn’t. Figuring out exactly what sold a book is almost impossible. See this article for more.

Do anti-aging creams actually work? Women spend billions annually on cosmetics. What an anti-aging cream actually does is to temporarily moisturize the skin. The wrinkles look smaller. You are exactly the same age as you were before you put it on. This is vanity, and the same holds true for all of the vanity publishing enterprises out there. I’ll say it again. “Buyer beware.”

My total cost to produce all of my titles, except for the internet, is about $50.00. My business is profitable, and sales are slowly creeping up. This is the only true test. If, like so many authors, you are holding down a day job and have $100,000 a year in household income, you are not a professional writer. You are easy meat for the vanity sellers because you think that throwing money at it is the best way to save time and solve problems. It is the easy road to success in the minds of the uninformed.

At one time, persistence was the key to some small success in this field. That’s not good enough anymore. Now you’re going to need some endurance, and an ability to look ahead and think clearly. You need to learn how to play the long game. You’ll need a thick skin and be able to let the bullshit roll off you like water from a duck’s back.

Just as a Dodge Ram 1500 is one of the world’s safest and most effective penis-enlargers, for some, writing books is all about ego, and vanity. They cannot accept that it takes a very long time to train a good writer. It’s learn on the job. You have to take a lot of pain. Most people really aren’t suited to it, and that’s tough love, but it is the truth, ladies and gentlemen.

It takes many years to become an overnight success. It requires patience, ability, and a lot of hard work.

You heard it here first.

Comments are always welcome.