Hi, y’all, the boss is on a road trip (something something LibertyCon) and messaged last night, “Hey Holly, put something up on MGC for me please?” Sarah’s so nice and polite: she even says please when she gives me permission to get up to mischief! So you’re stuck with me today, and instead of a blast from the past, I thought I’d riff a bit on something I was talking about with some other authors yesterday.

Larry Correia had posted a typical Larry Correia commentary on Facebook on some very silly advice about the mystique of authors and not revealing your real self to the readers. In his rant, he opined more or less along the lines of show yourself honestly, but only parts of yourself. This is solid, good, advice, but how do you do this?

Well, first off, I’d say decide what you’re going to NOT EVER share publicly. Medical stuff, unless your public persona includes sitting on a medical non-profit board or similar advocacy. Finance stuff, unless your public persona includes financial advocacy. (Think Dave Ramsay talking about his bankruptcy. You bet that helps his readers want to buy his books.) Home address, yes, never share that. Kid stuff, if you’re going to share keep it non personal and positive. “My kid finished her 4-H Quilt! I’m so proud!” never “My kid pooped his pants in church.” Nothing you wouldn’t want their potential employer to see on a vanity search for their name. Anything you share about other people, in fact, as a general rule, should be things that show them in a positive light. The people who want to be negative will bring that their own selves. Ooh, boy, will they ever.

What should you share? Writing things, and things you are passionate about outside your writing. Going back to Larry, he loves guns, hates cows, loves jujitsu, fills sandbags and fixes fence . . . Alma TC Boykin loves her students and fellow teachers (carefully anonymized and the worst she shows is mild teen folly), her cat, her gardens, history, and walking her neighborhood. Zan Oliver loves food and her city of New Orleans. Cedar Sanderson loves cooking, and her garden and cats. Emma Preston Hankins loves historical clothing. Dave Freer loves his small farm and his animals. Sarah Hoyt loves the USA and her cats. Stephanie Osborn loves everything geophysics and solar physics and how they work together, and her cat.

Yes, you may turn off some potential readers, who hate what you love. But I’d argue that probably they were never your potential readers, because what you love shows in your writing anyway. If you love a culture, you’re not going to write a book with no culture. If you love animals, you’ll have animals in your writing, even if they’re not modern Earth type animals.

However, if you want to maintain a social media presence, with small bits of personality, to keep yourself up in the algorithms so that when you publish a book your readers see it, pick an area or two of your life, probably the areas you ramble on when prompted or unprompted, and drop a few lines about that area on a regular basis. People, and readers are people, engage with interesting content, and the systems are designed to show people more of what they engage with, so if your reader clicks like on every photo of your rose garden, then your reader will also see your “Hey I have a new book out” post.

Your curated public persona is you, but it’s only parts of you. It’s putting up curtains on the house windows. It’s the front porch, not the bedroom. You get to decide what you want to share and how you want to share, and you get to keep private what you want to keep private. This is the exact same thing that we do in in-person relationships. The waitress doesn’t get to know everything about you, neither does the guy on the other side of the screen. Oversharing might get you some quick clicks, but it’s likely to hurt you in the end, just as much as oversharing with someone you don’t know well in person. Keep it to passion topics and you’ll have things to say that aren’t inappropriate to share with a general public.

After that, cut it short. Spread it out over a few days, schedule it to post in advance if you need to, that’s fine. Don’t be my young adult son telling me about Dark Souls in the kitchen for three hours. That’s a good solid three months of social media posting. (And don’t ask me to follow you if you do: I’ve already heard quite enough about Dark Souls, thank you very much!) You have more space on a blog, be more verbose there. But frequent and regular are keys on a blog as well. If you post every Wednesday at noon, you need to post every Wednesday at noon. If you post daily at seven, post daily at seven. Either seems to work, it’s the frequent and regular that keeps the readers coming back. For social media, short and very frequent seems to be the key: once a week and your readers won’t ever be shown the material by the website. Daily, twice daily, or more, seems to be favored by the programing. If you’re going to blog, moderate your comments. Blog hosts are honestly lousy at automated moderation. Pictures are great: the algorithms all seem to like pictures. For social media, links are bad: all the websites assume links are selling things and they aren’t getting a cut. This makes it a bit harder for those of us who are selling things. Larry’s famous “Zelda in comments” on Facebook is a way around the block on links, which apparently even includes the word ‘link’ at this point. Spend enough time with your choice of social media to learn the work-arounds, because when you want to say “Hey, I have a new book out!” you don’t want to get the post throttled until and unless you give the web company money.
And that’s what I’ve got. This and $3 will get you a cup of coffee. (Since when is black coffee a third of the price of a meal? We ordered water.)

So Holly, what’s the picture got to do with this topic?

Well, dear readers, that’s the rose plant we tried to move out of that garden some years ago, the only survivor of decades of efforts to get roses to grow in too shady a spot by the previous gardener. We missed some root, obviously. We put strawberries in last year in that bed, and they love it. Everyone’s happy, except the dog, which is why the fencing interlacing everything so she can’t hop in and excavate, as she does, being a Husky-Shepard cross. That’s part of me I’m willing to share on social media. There’s your example. (Yes, that is a desk. Someone was doing school outside.)