So you think you want to be a writer? For the record, it ain't easy, folks. The days of writing a novel, having it published, then writing another one and calling yourself an author are well past. It does not work that way anymore.
Add this to the list of shit I wish I'd known before now.
You need a web presence. Now it might seem, since you find some crazy stuff going viral on the Interwebs daily, that building and maintaining a web presence is easy. Nooooooo. Do not assume this.
See, for every crazy thing you see going viral, or every person who inexplicably has 10,000 Twitter followers, or every blog that is hyped from one side of the blog-o-sphere to the other, there's an exponentially larger number of videos, Tweets, and blogs going utterly unnoticed. For example, on my other blog, which I spent two years nurturing, I had more than 700 followers. Which is awesome. But it's a personal blog. At no point would I want the world to read about the time I...well, nevermind. The point is, I can't use that blog as a marketing tool. Heaven help me, no. So, for the purposes of a publishing career, that's two years down the pooper.
I also have a personal Twitter. My friends have a habit of TwitPic wars. Two days ago one of them posted a picture of me falling over the rail at a concert. Not even because I was drunk. Because I was standing on it and sneezed. See, no one needs to see that. Hell, I didn't even need to see that. So, another prime marketing tool. Down the pooper.
If you have a personal blog or Twitter or Facebook, awesome. Use it to stay in touch with that guy you met that one time whom you now stalk virtually. Do not assume you're going to be able to clean it up later and save all your followers. They know too much. They know you as the dumb chick who sneezed herself off a stadium railing. That is the tone that's been set in this, your virtual persona. You've got to treat those folks as mob stoolies. Only your true friends, the ones you know and can hit in real life, are going to avoid making you the author people make fun of by keeping their stories to themselves. Probably at the price of a shout-out on the acknowledgments page; and should it come to that, use 6 point font and get every person's name in there that knows things.
I'm kidding. My friends are awesome. And without them, my book wouldn't be possible.
Keep your personal blogs, Twitters, etc. private. Do not be lazy and throw those addresses out to keep from having to put in the work on a new online presence. Do not link to them in your query letters. No one wants to represent, I'm guessing, the author who has a picture of herself, ankles over drunk ass, with 2,000 comments about how hawt you look. I could be wrong about this, I suppose. Try it out. Let me know how it goes.
I wish someone had pointed this out to me before now. Starting from scratch is a long, often irritating process. Plus, now I gotta keep up with two blogs and two Twitters. I'm blogging and Tweeting my brains out over here. And there's always that moment of fear, the one following a new post, when you go, "Damn. Did I post that to the wrong one?"
Even if you just wrote the first sentence on what will surely be your Printz award winning book one day, get started. You'll be amazed how much longer it takes to cement a viable web presence than to write a novel and begin querying.
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