People always ask me “Ginny, how do you get people to pay attention to your work if you don’t use social media anymore?”. And my answer is always the same: “I don’t fucking know. Now please leave me alone, you aren’t even real people, you are just tiny thought gremlins that live inside my mind.”
But if you find yourself in a situation where you are unable/unwilling to dabble in the dark arts of social media, here is a list of things that have not worked that you can use as a roadmap for your further efforts.
Things That Don’t Work
- Ask friends to share your work. We all know this is like pulling teeth if pulling teeth required complicated and strategic social maneuverings on a case-by-case basis just to get one out of 30 people you know to do something that includes nothing involving tooth pain or even mild discomfort.
- Ask strangers to share your work. This only works if you already have a following somewhere. If you want to find a new audience, you need an old one to work from. And we all know how difficult it is to get people who supposedly like you to share your shit, strangers have no damn reason to do it unless they really feel motivated by something like a death threat and/or a really cute kitten with three legs.
- Try to find other blogs to connect to. Weirdos like myself keeping control of their “content” (I fucking hate that word and curse you for making me use it) on their own sites are very few and far between, and those that are only do so with the supplement of at least one social media outlet.
- Look up ways to promote your work without social media on search engines. This will lead you to other terrible ideas such as “enter contests”, “guest post on other people’s blogs”, and “start a newsletter”. I take particular umbrage with that last one, as there is nothing I want to do less than annoy any potential supporters of my work with emails.
- Complain about it. This tactic is currently in use and not working as of yet, I will update if anything changes.
I do have a few ideas that I haven’t been able to test out yet:
Things To Try
- Find a wealthy benefactor to fund your work so you don’t have these constant cycling thoughts about “finding an audience” and can instead work on other things. Haven’t figured out how to try this method yet, open to wealthy benefactors who would like to test this out.
- Commit various crimes. This would need its own list, but sharing my criminal enterprises seems dubious.
- Shout out the window at people telling them to visit your website. My current barriers to this idea are the lack of foot traffic and inadequate grasp of the local language, along with anonymity issues.
All of these ideas are plague-friendly. I’m sure there are many more ways to network and share with others that would involve physical interactions with humans or something else not viable in the current global situation. Maybe one day we can do some of those.
