Social Networking

[temporus]

Steven,

I'm curious about your opinion about social networking, especially in regards to self-promotion for writers. I've heard a number of people espouse the benefits therein, and it sounds very useful.

For example, I have noticed that Tananarive has a myspace page, but you do not.

Certainly there is a danger that one could distract oneself with too much emphasis on that kind of networking, to the detriment of producing quality product. But balance is ever a part of life goals, no?

I wonder, do you think you might have been able to reach a wider audience (in particular a target demographic such as Black Males as you want to tap into) easier if the internet had been such a ubiquitous "utility" as it is today?

Regards,
Ed

[Steven Barnes]

Maybe--if enough black males were on the internet. I suspect that every bit of promotion helps, but you can also get lost in the effort to reach people. For instance, book signings promote books. But at what point are they not worth the time and effort you put into doing them? Does it make sense to spend 1000 bucks to travel across the country and sign 500 books? Maybe, maybe not. Time, energy, and money all have to factor in. If black males have NEVER had the kind of reading material (in comparable depth--there's always been a little) that white males have had, it wouldn't make sense to expect a similar percentage of them to read fiction. It takes time to educate and cultivate an audience. I had to commit to struggling with this issue for maybe thirty years. I may NEVER really benefit optimally from those efforts...but some 20-something writer coming up behind me might.

[temporus]

That is a very interesting question. If enough black males are on the internet. I'm not certain what enough is, in the sense here of how many it might take to generate the correct number of sales to create a success. Having exactly no experience myself with how many sales you would need to make to quantify something as a success, its impossible for me to know.

However, that's never exactly stopped me from attempting to speculate.

I decided to see if I could put numbers on it, so I went to the US Census Bureau to see what kind of data could be found. www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p23-208.pdf

The problem with the data provided as I see it, is that you can get data by Race. You can get data for Sex. But you don't see data by Sex by Race (or Race by Sex whichever way you want to think about it.) So while there could be more Black women than Men using the interent, or vice versa, this data isn't set up to show it.

However, I'll see if I could make a point.

For approx 24.5 million adult Black americans, this survey asserts that 40.4% of them have internet access at home, or 9.88 million. Of those that have internet access, 79.8% make use of it, or 7.88 million. So far, I think those numbers reflect the survey okay.

Here's where I get into much more speculation. Since I don't know the breakdown specific by race, I can at best take the percentage of men vs women from the entire statistic. That's 48% men of the total population. That's assuming that there are approximately the same ratio of men to women in the Black population as the entire population at large, which could be wrong. But given that assumption, that leaves me with a US population of approximately 3.78 million Black male adult internet users from home. (For a point of comparison, using the same method, compare that to 42.64 million White male adults) This is using the internet from home. The total is a bit higher if you include use anywhere, moving it up to 5.23 million.

I was told a long time ago by one of my bosses, that when it comes to advertising, approximately 4% of everyone who sees a product buys it. I have no clue the truth to that postulation. But if I were to use that as a rubric, and make the assumption of every single Black Male home internet surfer as calculated above, that would equate to ~151 thousand sales. But that's getting into *enormous assumptions*, that aren't reasonable. I mean, how likely would advertising reach every single person in your target demographic? (Slim) Further, I question how accurate the 4% number is. It was told to me by an old businessman, who had been in sales, and manufacturing for many years, but is it truly accurate, how would I know. I work in a datacenter, I'm about as far removed from that part of the business world as I can be.

In terms of social networking, I can only go off my own personal experience. Out of the authors I "know" online, either through chat networks, or reading blogs, etc, I've purchased books by about 65-75% of them. (I now own three by yourself, and one by your wife, just as an example. And I can testify that those sales exist because of your blog, or I most likely would have spent those dollars elsewhere.) I wonder though, out of all the authors I've ever encountered blogs for, or myspace pages, etc, what % have I stopped to read and why. For that I've no answer. What I can say is that familiarity increases loyalty.

Okay, that's a huge pile of speculation, I think I'll stop there.

Ed