Yet Another Post About Tumblr

So, a while back, I decided to give Tumblr a try.

And in short, to me, it’s a love-hate thing. 

What I love: The lay-out. How easy it is to find the community you’re aiming for. 

What I don’t love: Well. Said community has this way of picking pet “causes” that they’re fighting for, regardless of where the facts truly lie. I wrote about the whole thing that went on about John Green back when Tumblr was still seething with all that nonsense. 

Fortunately, we’ve seemed to move on from there, but unfortunately that just brings home the fact that the community is 100% pro trade publishing. Or 1000% fanatical about it. 

Which isn’t a bad thing in itself. I personally have PLENTY of issues with trade publishing as it stands at the moment, but other people don’t, so I try to only throw out my two cents when I feel like there are too much bad information out there without someone bothering to understand what’s going on.

And Tumblr has this in spades. Which is to say they swallow the trade publishing line on self publishing without a second thought and makes Amazon out to be this monster out to exploit writers. (Ha. Hahahahaha. Ha.)

I just find this incredibly frustrating, because the Tumblr-ites are single-minded in believing what they’re told, and if they get told anything else, it simply does not compute.

And this, simply put, is making me wonder if Tumblr is really worth my time. I mean, if they’re going to ignore my book simply by dint of me refusing to be screwed over by publishing houses, without actually bothering to listen to reason, I can only assume that there’s not much left to do or say, is there?

On the other hand, I’m not only on social media to market my books. In fact, the marketing aspect mostly comes second. But if being active on a platform does both (marketing and meeting new people), why should I bust my butt trying to get in on one where the community can be downright punitive toward people with different opinions?

Are you on Tumblr? How do you find it? 

Tumblr and Wattpad

I’m a strange person, I know. See, when I got the rights to The Vanished Knight back, I thought of the whole experience as a lesson in a lot of things. 

One of those was in social media marketing. Accurately, I can describe it as a lesson in the complete and utter failure of social media marketing. I’m not kidding. When I first published my book, I had a huge and very active blog, and about 10k worth of people on twitter besides that.

Did they help me sell the book? Weeeeeell… Let’s just say I blog, tweet and what have you for more reasons than selling my books. I really enjoy it, but I used links on my social media that counted the clicks after I posted them. 

Maybe I’d get one or two clicks a day. And none of those would convert to sales. 

I think maybe that a lot of my previous sales came from blog tours. Except not because I was reaching new readers. It was bloggers who knew me, are awesome people, and who wanted to support me. (Thanks for that, by the way!) 

Which is to say (and I know there are a lot of me who might scream at me), but I don’t think there’s much point to me marketing to you guys on my blog, twitter, facebook, google plus (because you’re all there too.) Which means that once my blog tour is over, you probably won’t see a lot in the way of marketing on my writing platforms. 

See the thing is, I don’t even really think you’re my target market. Which is fine. I love this community and will try to be part of it for as long as it exists. But my market is elsewhere, so that’s where I have to go. 

Which is why I’ve been working my way into Wattpad with some success (TVK has had almost 900 reads in almost three months) and am trying to work my way into Tumblr. 

And… well. Both give me mixed feelings for different reasons. Wattpad is often a insane place, but there’s a market for me there. People like my opinions and advice. They ask for it a lot. I mean, my book on writing (specifically creating tension) has gained almost 9.5k reads in a bit more than a year without me really doing that much. 

Tumblr… Tumblr… Tumblr. Dashboard is nice. The thing is, the social aspect feels a lot like some sort of inter-generational high school clique. I really wanted to like Tumblr. Still do, really, but right now, IT PISSES ME OFF. 

So much so that I’m considering to unfollow everyone except the people following me and start from scratch. I mean, I know that it’s hard to get into a new community like the one on Tumblr. I mean, it took me the better part of 18 months to really feel at home and entrenched in this here writing/blogging community. 

The thing is, I’m watching the goings on on Tumblr and I’m wondering if I even want to be part of it. 

To give you the highlights so far: 1) Non-writers talking smack about writers. 2) Same non-writers professing to adore reading. 3) But still talking smack about writers. (I’m not even talking bad reviews. Those would be fine. I’m talking about the fact that people are CALLING JOHN GREEN A PERVERT for daring to be an adult male who writes books about teenage girls.) 4) People who are so narrow minded that they’ll completely push someone out for “not belonging to our particular fandom.” 5) But PRIDING themselves on being such open-minded, fair individuals. 6) Or people arguing about stuff that they DO NOT WANT TO EVEN TRY TO UNDERSTAND. Like… (you guessed it.) Writing. And (you probably wouldn’t guess it) the fact that Africa is in fact a continent with a huge variety of countries and peoples and most of our animals don’t like being in zoos. 

Now, you guys know me as a rather opinionated girl, so I’m sure you’ll agree that this really is bothering me when I’m spending more than three quarters of my time telling myself to “Not touch this one.” Because someone said something utterly foolish that gets eaten up just because they’ve amassed a huge following in some way. And because I know that engaging 1) won’t make me feel better and 2) won’t even help them because there’s nothing more impossible to reason with than a person who doesn’t want to hear it. 3) It’s pointless to point out the ignorance in the statement of someone who self-congratulated themself on their open-minded wisdom two posts ago. 

So here I am, wondering if I’m doing this Tumblr thing wrong. Or if I should do what I said and just unfollow 90% of my list. Because hey, I should be enjoying it first and foremost. Correct? 

Anyone on Tumblr? Got advice?