Social Media Updates

As part of the Great Twitter Migration, I'm doing several things.

For one, I'm giving my best shot at restarting my author newsletter. I sent a "not dead yet!" letter out yesterday and hope to return to a monthly schedule. Part of the secret is going to be not setting myself an unsustainable content goal. I'll just mention what's new and if I feel like adding "extras" I will, but I won't require it of myself.  If I keep to this enough to put out a December newsletter, I'm going to run a new subscribers campaign with the bait of a drawing for an audiobook. And because I dislike disincentivizing my current subscribers, I'll also have an opt-in drawing for a second audiobook.

Several months ago, I set up a Mastodon account as @heatherrosejones at the Wandering.Shop instance. Mastodon looks like it's "the new twitter" except without the corporate ownership and wide open gaps for abuse. Relying as it does on volunteer labor and voluntary financial support, it's a different type of thing than twitter, but that means a lot more local control over your experience there, while still being able to connect with people across (most of) the whole of the Mastodon federation. I'm not the person to explain Mastodon to you if you want to know more, but there should be plenty of explainers out there.

I need to explore using my HootSuite account to automate more of the routine content announcements across my social media. Currently I do a lot of manual posts for every blog and podcast and for book publicity. I have some content files set up for automatically posting links to older podcast content and mean to do that for older LHMP blog content, but it takes doing a lot of set-up. But if I'm remembering HootSuite's capabilities correctly, I should be able to create a "hey, here's a new podcast"  post there and set it up to send it to all my social media. Which would make things more efficient.

As always, if people want a more casual interactive social media experience loosely focused around my work, ask me for an invitation to join the Alpennia Discord. It's small, sporadic, and low impact and full of creative friendly people. (And I really do need to draft up a formal "expectations for conduct" document for it, so it'll be there if the Discord ever takes off.

And you know that you can always comment on this blog, right? Right? I know, I know, "Blogging is Dead." But a girl can dream.

What other things do you think it might be fun and/or useful to do in terms of social media? Given that I already have a YouTube channel for the LHMP, I've thought about adding (adapated) video chat versions of the LHMP book blogs. For some reason I don't recall, I set up an Instagram account. I haven't really done anything with it, but yesterday as a test post I put up a video of the otters in the Contra Costa Canal that I stopped to film on my bike ride. What does one do with an Instagram? What would *you* find fun or interesting? Keep in mind that my time and energy is finite, but it's so hard to guess what might hit a niche that I haven't thought of yet.