Twitter (I refuse to address it by its new name) has finally pulled the pin on Tweetdeck, and so I’ll be gone from Twitter, except to post links and promotional stuff.
This saddens me greatly, because it was a great site to keep up-to-date with various types of news. This was definitely the case before the muskrat broke it, but continued to be like that with Tweetdeck, which was subject to none of the things (for you page, timeline priorities, ads) that made Twitter increasingly useless. Alas, no more.
So why the headline?
Well, I’ve been hanging out on other social media sites, and on there, incredible discussions are still taking place as if selfpublishing never happened, or as if Amazon is the only platform to sell your books. And I’m like, it’s as if a whole evolution just went past some people. People who don’t fit the stereotype of the luddite living under a rock, but who have somehow missed out on all the discussions we’ve been having on various places over the internet, Authonomy, Kindleboards, Facebook groups and yes, on Twitter, for the past ten years. These appear to be people new to publishing, who google “how to publish a book”, get hit in the face with ads for vanity publishers, rightfully think URGH and then conclude the traditional route is the only way. People who are somehow missing out on information that is available in a lot of places, but no longer centralised in one place as it once was. There are a lot of excellent Facebook groups for writers, and a lot of really awful ones. Facebook, which is essentially forum software at its core, is not very good at displaying nested discussions (read: fucking awful) so it’s still quite easy to miss a lot of stuff. It’s also easy to get caught in highly pillared echo chambers.
Here is the challenge: question everything, especially if it comes through second hand messengers and is quoted at you as dogma. You have to do this because that’s how it’s done. Nope. In this industry, nothing is static and everything depends on individual circumstances. Dare to say: this is not for me.
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