Promoting your writing: a response

Technically, as a writer, yes, I do spend a lot of time there. I just counted, and I think this is the 59th article I’ve published in 2015 (as of this moment, at least nine more are pending: either in the works or waiting for publication). But what Roz really means is that a successful writer nowadays shouldn’t be shy about promoting herself. And here, I fear, is where I’m falling down on the job — because Twitter, which Roz says anyone with any sense is using, makes me want to hit the snooze button six more times.

Oh, I’m on Twitter, and not one of those accounts with a few tweets from August 2012. “Why not shout it to the rooftops?” Roz demands of writers who are reluctant to self-promote. “Why not make it easy for readers to find you?”

Excuse me while I don my mercenary’s helmet.

Get thee behind me, organic reach

I understand the complex digital ecosystem of modern media: The bigger my audience or “platform,” the more I’m worth to a potential publisher. But in the meantime, who am I going to bill for all that relentless promotion? Not the companies that assign, buy, and publish my work, but expect me to market it. (I swear, if someone explains the phrase “organic reach” to me one more time, I will crush this pint of ice cream with my bare hand.)

Last year, I sat bemused and frustrated through a social media strategy meeting for freelancers at a major Philadelphia news outlet — and not because I don’t know to use social media, or don’t understand its value.

The presenter, the outlet’s social media manager, informed us that being active on social media is not something that any of us can avoid if we want to succeed. This ain’t 2006, when I graduated from college and thought, thank goodness I won’t have to deal with people asking me if I’m on Facebook anymore. Social media is our professional landscape now, and it’s our responsibility to use it effectively. The manager had plenty of suggestions for using social media to build momentum and traffic around the stories we write: tweeting while en route to assignments, live-tweets from the scene, and then different methods of phrasing multiple tweets with a link to the finished article.

All of this, she assured us, actually benefits us more than the publication we’re working for, because we get to hitch our little empires to a respected name in media, and watch our personal platforms grow because of it.

I was relieved when another freelancer raised the question on my mind.

All that expert tweeting is a lot of work. Are we going to be compensated for it?

Even if you’re not a freelance writer, I bet you know what the unapologetic answer was.

More work for the same pay

So it’s not just a matter of personal reticence versus, as Roz sees it, the writer’s natural narcissism. Independent writers like Roz and I are in a peculiar transitional bind, where our industry recognizes proper use of social media platforms as integral to our work — but often refuses to face the fact that accomplishing this type of promotion is a valuable and time-consuming skill for which we are not being paid.

After working with several media outlets for several years, I’ve watched my workload grow with no corresponding increase in compensation. I used to write and file my articles and get paid for them. Now, I’m expected to write and file my articles, and then spend my own time promoting them properly to the hundreds of followers I’ve amassed on social media (followers that the publications I write for are gaining immediate access to for free). The promotion that Roz urges isn’t just a personal choice to further my success. It’s a balancing act for my bottom line. How much time does it take to thoughtfully promote 59 articles on Twitter, not to mention maintaining my account with other content, conversations, and quips? More time than I can afford to spend, if I’m going to meet my deadlines.

For many of my articles, I do exactly what Roz suggests, because I feel compelled to live up to my own little cog in the modern media machine, gaining fans along the way, and getting those heartfelt messages from readers that make it worthwhile.

The truth about delivery

But think of it this way. The majority of traffic to articles on the web is driven by social media. Ask a writer or journalist to spend her own unpaid time delivering her pieces there and nobody turns a hair. It’s just social media! But how about this Slate headline: “Newspaper Asks Journalists to Deliver the Paper After They’re Done Writing It.”

California’s Orange County Register was in a bind after a distributor change, so it pressed its newsroom employees into service, asking them to deliver up to 600 newspapers in exchange for a $150 Visa gift card.

The gall of that paper.

But even if nobody will admit it, I’m no different than Orange County Register journalists who took the delivery job, though at least they got 25 cents for each paper they delivered. I get nothing for digitally delivering the articles I write, except the uncertain promise of “exposure” and brand-building on the coattails of the publications I write for, in hopes that one day, somehow, it’ll all pay off — or my industry accepts that time spent on successful social media promotion should add to my bottom line, instead of draining my time away.