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.

Selling to foreign markets.

Selling to foreign markets in the midst of a recession can really help to hone your skills as a writer. As a professional, you need to learn how to do your own detective work.

I attended ‘Genrecon,’ which was held at the Sarnia Library on April 25, 2009. It was my first convention, and I learned a lot. Established authors talked about marketing, rights, selling short genre and literary fiction. Among the authors who attended; Jean Rae Baxter, Vicki Delaney, Gord Rollo, Dennis Collins, Douglas Smith, Sylvia Hutchings, and others.

We learned, “If you need to sell a quart of milk, don’t sell the whole cow, or worse, give away the whole farm.”

Gord Rollo explained it this way: “If a small, regional publication plans on publishing your story once, and perhaps archiving it on their website, what do they need the film rights for? Why would they need foreign-language rights?”

Seller beware: know what you are selling, and what they are buying. Otherwise some other person may sell your film rights, and without anything spelled out in the contract, you may have a hard time proving a case. Ignorance of the terms of your contract is not a defense, nor is it an 'out.'

And the key thing to remember is that you just never know—but TV and film producers have to get their ideas from somewhere, and they read magazines just as much as anyone else. I don’t care if they read it in the bathroom.

Aurora Award-winning author Douglas Smith talked about selling, 'reprint’ rights. Once your story has appeared and the rights have lapsed again, you can re-sell the story an unlimited number of times, although some publications don’t accept reprints, and the price or value of a reprint is less than a brand-new, first-time original story. You can also sell it at the exact same time in a hundred other languages. Recently Mike Resnick set a personal record, having sold a story thirty times. Douglas Smith also set a personal record, by selling a story on the sixty-fifth submission! His advice is, ‘Never give up on a story.”

But as he pointed out, “You can pick up an extra few hundred dollars from any given story. That adds up to real money after a while.”

Douglas has been published in twenty-four languages and in twenty-nine countries at last count. So when I learned that he had a website, with a market list, I logged on to www.smithwriter.com and had a look.

Now, this is a foreign-language, reprint market, but I just wrote a few details down, went through my files, and found a small number of science-fiction stories, and started submissions by e-mail. None of these particular stories had ever appeared in English. And I began to write up every dumb little idea that I had for science-fiction, fantasy, psychological horror, or some stories which could be described as, ‘speculative fiction,’ and I suppose some stuff which defies description.

If I had an idea for a poem, I wrote it up as best I could. After a while, with a few e-mails going back and forth, I learned about other market lists. At the time of this writing I have four or five stories awaiting translation.

I have not been published as a science-fiction author in Canada, but I suppose I might as well keep trying! Sooner or later, someone around here will give me a break—I’m an internationally-renowned author after all, with a pretty good little cult following.

Now when I submit a story to a publication, I have something to put in the cover letter. I have foreign-language credits, I’ve had science fiction published, poetry, an essay; as for what’s next, I just don’t know. But I’m sure it will be something just a little bit edgy. Something out there in the badlands of the human psyche.

Something that grabs the reader, (or better yet, the editor,) by the throat and never lets them go until they’ve read my story. I want them to talk about it the next day as they’re sitting around the coffee shack wishing they were lucky enough to have time to write. Just for the record, I fell flat on my face over four hundred and eighty-plus times to get those stories out there.

Luck has nothing to do with it. Writing for foreign markets is challenging. You have to think of the foreign editors. Take out slang, contractions, colloquial expressions, folk sayings, anything that makes the translator’s job harder. What you end up with is nice, tight copy that doesn’t make your English-speaking readers work too hard, because they don’t have any time to waste either.

Only one of the stories that I’ve placed actually pays any money, but it’s something to build on. What a huge burst of self-confidence!

Other science fiction, fantasy and horror market lists include ww.duotrope.com; as well as ‘The Market List,’ which I found had a few dead markets, then there’s Gareth D. Jones’ list in the U.K. For science fiction, humour and other genre markets, try www.ralan.com.au for an extensive set of listings. I’ve stumbled across a couple of smaller lists as well online. The SF Site, which is Canadian, has a market list as well, and I mined through that.

One spark of inspiration hit me so far. By taking out sex, gory violence, swearing, and religious controversy, I can open up my work to a much wider potential audience. This probably applies more so to my short stories rather than the novels. Essentially I looked back and thought about all the really good books I read when I was younger. Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, and Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven; these are good writers with very little of what you might call, ‘erotica,’ or language, or excessive blood and gore. When they deal with religion, they do it symbolically. They sold a lot of stories as well.

The best advice is, “Figure out who your audience is.”

My own personal perspective is interesting. I did get a contract from one publisher, and they were buying 'all rights in all languages.' It was a long contract, for five years, and an automatic renewal for three years. By coming out with new editions, they could have essentially owned that book for the rest of my life.

Think about what you are doing, before you sign any contract.

One year ago, I had never had a sci-fi story accepted anywhere, and now I've been published in English, Spanish, Dutch, Estonian, and Greek.

For that I can thank Doug's Foreign Market List, and presumably, a little effort on my part.

Good luck and good hunting.