For Writers: The Importance of Writing Groups and Social Media

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So in a previous post "They're Putting Me to Work" I mentioned how the writing group I am involved with and basically do all the work for, has decided to boost up our presence online and that falls on me. Yesterday I wrote a new year welcoming post, a meeting review post, and a post about "The Muse" written by another member. When I post these I always share them on our Facebook page and Twitter page. Well dangit! This morning I got up to a bunch of email messages. That post was picked up by two different Twitter Dailies. If you don't know what those are they are Daily "newspapers" online where whoever is running them posts tweets they believe are worth sharing. They usually have a specific theme to them. I've gotten my contest tweets picked up by some of these Dailies. I also received a re-tweet on this blog post "The Muse". Because of all this activity I found it necessary to share it with the member who wrote "The Muse". But then I thought I better write an email advising the group about it and about the importance of THEM posting on the blog. If you want to be published, picked up by an agent, or whatever, you NEED to be on social media. You NEED to be seen. It was a lengthy email. Then I saw another email advising me of a post so I sent another email to the group. Then I copy and pasted the dailies to our Facebook page. I also went to Twitter and re-tweeted the posts that advised of the Daily and that @HWG5 contributed. Here is the blog I see someone has added another post since last night (now I have to tweet it and share it on our Facebook page). So if you want to see what I posted scroll down. My pen name is Mary Patricia Bird which is my name on this blog. My beach picture is 4 posts down along with the poem I wrote about a picture of another member. Here are the Dailies that picked up the post: http://paper.li/Lehmanandlehman/1298583883?edition_id=e5560370-c369-11e5-9524-0cc47a0d15fd http://paper.li/StoryDam/1319974679?edition_id=d9167af0-c34f-11e5-a618-0cc47a0d1605 So if you want to write with the hope of being published one day, you need to be on social media. You need to be ACTIVE on social media. You need to follow the right people and organizations. In a lot of cases they will follow you back. So you can't just sit in a corner and write your book. You need to promote yourself before you even HAVE a published book.