Wednesday, November 13, 2013

NW Bookfest '13, Workshop Review #4: Staying Sane in the Digital Age

 
(Image:  Red Pill Blue Pill by Pencilshade1)
 
 Remember in my NW Bookfest Overview, I mentioned the writing community was spit over how involved authors should be in social media?  Well, looking back on the first day of this conference, I noticed that the very pro social media workshops were scheduled in the morning, while the afternoon seminars were hosted by the more casual social media users.
 
Starting with this one.
 
Staying Sane in the Digital Age was hosted by:
 
 
 
 
I was only a minute or two late for the workshop and found the small room packed to standing-room-only capacity.  (My recommendation to the organizers of next year's NW Bookfest:  Any workshop with the keywords "digital" and "sanity" needs to be held in a larger room).
 
None of these young ladies were of the all-social media-all-the-time variety.  While they recognized the importance of having an on-line presence, they valued their writing time even more.  So they suggested--
 
--Have a website and make yourself available to your readers, but protect your writing time.
 
If you find maintaining a blog siphons-off your writing time, then you can guest-write on other blogs.  Keep in mind some (many?/all?) of them are by invitation only. 
 
While we've heard the mantra of "write everyday," this is not always possible.  Because of her teaching job, Katherine for instance, does all her writing in August.  Kinda like a one-woman, summer NaNoWriMo.
 
Bottom line:  You don't have to do every bit of social media or on-line activity to be visible to your readers.
 
That pretty much covered it.
 
The rest of the workshop was spent discussing various writer tools, such as--
 
--MacFreedom and
 
 
While some of the sites they recommended were--
 
 
 
 
 
Unlike other time-suck websites, at least when you troll around the ones mentioned above, you're bound to learn something.

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