I first started using Facebook when a friend of mine got
married in Perth, Australia and posted her wedding pics on FB (hello Telly
Tubby x) and since then it has been a very useful way to keep in touch with far
away friends that we miss in the Caribbean .
When Twitter first started at first it sounded a bit silly
to me and you know it, or some of the Tweople who use it, are Very Silly Indeed
or worse. Nevertheless I joined up,
started tweeting and have a little over 1,000 followers. Sometimes it is quite fun and sometimes
useful and informative.
I find Pinterest a great way to store photos, both mine and
other people's, in the cloud - a kind of online scrapbook and also a way to
publicise my work. My book "The Leftovers Handbook", the publishers
felt, is so full of information there is no room for photos so I put them on
Pinterest just in case anyone is interested.
Stumble upon can be a great timewaster and I used to get
stuck on it for hours, in fact one day a very spooky thing happened to me on
Stumble Upon see here LINK
Blogging has become a regular and enjoyable habit for me and
I am trying to keep it going during this troublesome time
I did not realise, however, until my recent (and continuing)BT Fiasco quite how useful a marketing tool networking is.
Since publication sales of my book The Leftovers Handbook have
generally hovered in Amazon's rank at about 30,000 (the lower the number the
better the sales) give or take a few thousand until BT disconnected our phone
line. See how sales immediately dropped
soon after I stopped networking and then how they shot up again after I spent a
day online at my friend's house.
I thought this might just be a fluke but it happened again
the following week rather more spectacularly ...
... and I fully expect the same thing to happen in the next
few days (fingers etc. crossed).
Of course when I am fully operational I don't just promote
my own books and blogs I comment on other people's thoughts and ideas, make
suggestions, joke, retweet things I find interesting, have conversations and
generally post things I think funny haha or funny peculiar. This is all very well but sometimes I've been
doing it for hours and have to remind myself to get on with "important"
things and stop playing!
Hopefully I shall be back online on or around or just after
the weekend, perhaps, and can get back to my tweeting and in the meantime here
is a bit of heartfelt networking I saw from the bus recently ...
