Why Mr Glover Doesn't Need Facebook

When writer and broadcaster Richard Glover wrote a column about his 20 favourite Facebook faux pas, his last point ruffled the feathers. “Posting a link to your own work…as if I’d ever do something as egocentric as that.”

Mr Glover doesn’t need Facebook. He has a longstanding gig on ABC radio, a weekly newspaper column, eight published books and a well-stocked website. Other writers are not so well established. For them, Facebook and Twitter are occupational necessities.

Back in early 2011, before the serious writing course (TSWC) when this serious writer hit the metal, vis a vis writing, it became obvious that without social media, we emerging writers are stuffed. My plan to write, get published and get paid wasn't a fly by night scheme cooked up in a drunken state on New Years Eve. I had attended courses. I’d worked for 12 years in a uni, writing all the time I'd enjoyed miniscule publishing success already. But it was time to have a serious crack at it.

In a changing (read shrinking) old fashioned publishing world, the only option is to get brave and ignore the rants of polite people who have bad thoughts about blatant self-promotion. Embracing social media to support others is mandatory too. In the absence of a publisher who thinks I'm amazing, there is no alternative.
Attend literary festivals and learn the true state of the writing industry. Whilst full immersion into the literary triumphs of others without a book to call your own can be sick-making, by the time I had seen the last of the crowds at the Sydney Writers Festival in May, I felt more compelled than ever.
Bali last October for the annual literary festival; throw in workshops and a story reading or two; despite vowing to leave the fragile ego at home, there were times when I wanted to throw myself into the nearest garbage-strewn creek. I stayed away from bars and parties and wrote a little piece about surviving literary festivals which nobody wanted to publish. Like all the others, it ended up on this little blog.
Bali memories have faded, but Alex Miller’s advice hasn’t: “If you want to write, stop scribbling notes at festivals, go home and write.”
The writing world is overpopulated, poverty-stricken and exploitative. The matter of non-payment for published stories came to the fore at the Huffington Post blog site (where non-staff writers and bloggers supplied the popular website's content for free). Founder Arianna Huffington sold the site for $315 million but the issue of non-payment remains.
We writers love to write. We writers need to publish, paid or not, to increase profile, so we writers will write for free and find time to moan about it. I was paid $10 for one of my sixteen stories last year. That's $10 more than many journalism students on internships earn.
TSWC maintains there'll always be a market for stories. Of course there will. So I will continue to flog my efforts on Facebook and Twitter, and anywhere else that'll have me, with or without Mr Glover's approval.
Now back to writing.