7 Things Famous Writers Can Do That You Can't

When it comes to the actual writing, it is good to imitate writers well-known for their fiction's quality, or at the least, famous writers of your genre (and others.)

When it comes to blogging and social media, there are many things that the well-known, mainstream-published author is and should be doing that you, a new, unknown, unpublished/self-published writer, must not imitate.

1. Write only about their own books --- authors like Orson Scott Card, Holly Lisle, Jerry B. Jenkins, Charlaine Harris, and Jeff Lindsay (author of the Dexter novels) know that the people that read their blog or follow their tweets and Facebook postings because they are already fans. They want to hear all they can about their author's published and upcoming books. For the rest of us, most of our followers are not familiar with our writing and thus are not fans of it. Writing too much about our work feels like advertising, and no one likes being advertised at.

2. Refer offhand to characters and situations from their books --- when a well-known author does this, it is what his fans want. When we do it, we are making our readers feel like outsiders because they haven't read our book yet. This will not make them run out and buy your self-published book.

3. Forget to proofread --- when a famous author misspells a word in a blog post or tweet or makes some other obvious error, no one thinks a thing about it. He's good enough to get published by a mainstream publisher, so the error is forgiven. When we do it, our readers assume we are bad writers. If the mistake is the misuse of big words, we are pretentious bad writers. Proofread everything down to the shortest tweet.

4. Offer a free ebook --- when bestselling Christian author Jerry B. Jenkins announced on Facebook that his novel 'Riven' would be available as a free ebook for limited time only, folks jumped on the offer. He's an author that's made the bestseller lists many, many times. When we make free offers, folks take it like they take offers of a free kitten. This doesn't mean you shouldn't offer your self-published ebook for free--- it just means that folks won't take it as a precious gift but as a potential waste of their reading time. It is more like they, the readers, are giving you a gift when they take the time to download and read your free ebook. Be thankful when this happens.

5. Be rude to commenters --- when you have a blog or a social media account, comments and replies are your life blood. A nationally known author has floods of commenters and, if the mood strikes him, can afford to call one or two of the most annoying ones idiots. We who are not yet known must cherish all our misspelling, zany, and odd commenters, and only when they are actually uttering death threats or spewing hostile profanity can we afford to scare them off.

6. Ask you to vote up their book on a web site --- while famous authors rarely make these kinds of requests, it would not be off-putting to their readers/followers if they did. If we do something like that, we are imposing on our readers. What if they haven't read our book yet or didn't like it? At best, you might mention in passing if your book is gaining ground on a GoodReads list or something. Leave it up to your readers what to do with that bit of information.

7. Insult a whole political faction or religion --- while this is a stupid thing to do even for the most popular authors in the country, they can get away with this if they do so within the limits of political correctness. Years ago I visited Stephen King's web site and saw a rant in which he proclaimed his opinion that conservatives were stupid. His fame was such at the time that he could probably gotten away with saying liberals were stupid. Maybe. All I know is that before I read that web site, I bought every Stephen King novel out there and read them to pieces, and bought books about Stephen King. Afterwards, I have only once or twice bought the new Stephen King novel, and rarely re-read my Stephen King collection, because aware of his real-life attitudes, I can't write off the intolerance in his books as just part of the fiction. But Stephen King was big enough at the time he didn't need me as a reader.  We, on the other hand, can't afford to actually insult conservatives, liberals, Christians or Jews, even if what we write is political thrillers aimed at those who share our views or religious fiction for those who share our faith. We have to cherish every person who gives us his attention, perhaps especially the ones who do so in spite of political or religious differences.

I think perhaps the best way to sum the whole thing up is that all writers, in social media interactions or blogging, need to come across as humble. For the bestselling author, they do it by humbling themselves to interact with their readers by internet at all. For us, we must never presume that our readers have any abiding interest in our books or book-related news, and must limit our mention of these things. Blogging and social media are about building friendships, not about peddling books or anything else to the uninterested.

To find a blogging role model, look to blogs by indie and small press authors who have won a successful following by NOT talking about their book all the time. Mike Duran's blog, in my sidebar, is one example, Karina Fabian's blog, also in the sidebar, is another.