Radio Silence

Being an author in the social media age is an interesting experience. Doing an interview, a reading, a convention, it’s obvious that you might well be in something of a public mode or “on.” You might craft your blog posts carefully. But are you “on” when you’re writing on Twitter? When you’re commenting on Facebook? What if you’re commenting on your mother’s picture of the bundt cake she baked, but where your fans can read it? It’s an odd gray area, simultaneously less exhausting than something like a convention because it’s just one tweet on a computer at a time; and more because relatives’ bundt cakes smash into heated discussions of genre definitions and you have to decide what degree of public mode to be for each on the fly.

Which is long way of saying, after the effort of REFLECTED’s publicity, I’m taking a break for a few weeks! Plenty of the cool kid authors take a break from the internet, so I know this isn’t going to shock anyone. I chose to separate things out a little–I will be reading and responding to my email (business, after all, goes on), I simply will be radio silent on this blog and my various social media outposts. I shall return in time for Norwescon (April 17-20), which is why I got my schedule up ahead of time for you all.

Since I’m a scientist, and I love data, once I’m back you can expect a post about what radio silence did to my Amazon author ranking. I’ve heard anecdotal data that lack of social media presence once a book is fully launched has no impact on sales (and Amazon rankings, as I’ve explored before on this blog, aren’t sales), so I’m curious to see what happens.

So if you need me, drop me an email. Otherwise, I’ll see you in April!