In this episode, we’re talking with special guest Liza Palmer about social media for authors. Liza’s exerience working for Buzzfeed gives her a unique inside look at what’s hot online and she shares her insights into which strategies might work for authors. We dig into going where your audience is, not trying to “boil the ocean”, what the heck TikTok is, and how to be ourselves in a way that our uniqueness is an asset.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 008: Social Media Strategy for Writers with Liza Palmer

Liza Palmer: Hi, I’m Liza Palmer. Welcome to the strategic authorpreneur podcast, where today we’re talking about social media and how to thread it into a writing life.

Crystal: Hey there strategic authorpreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt

Michele: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.

Crystal: Welcome to episode number eight of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to tackle what I find to be one of my favorite and also most challenging aspects of the publishing process, which is connecting with readers via social media.

So we’re going to talk a bit about best practices and things that you can do and avoid in social media. But we have a very special guest who is Liza Palmer, who is going to be joining us to talk about that. But first we’re going to give you a little update about what we’ve been up to since we were last here with you.

So what have we been doing in our author lives, Michele?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: Well, I’ve been doing a lot of things, my dear. I just wanted to say that I’m very excited about the coming interview with Liza, because I do believe there is so much content filled with value.

I’ve been actually concentrating a lot on the getting to understand how the subscriber side of things work for our authors. As you might remember, I’m kind of starting out in that phase. So I figure after reading so many things about subscribers, and how to get them, how to organically try to interest as much people as possible to your work and to you as an author.

So in the last few days, I started reading a lot of resources about that particular subject. How to build up your newsletter. Which is actually the most, probably, important asset you can do medium to long term for your author career. And this time trying to do it the right way.

With me, there is, there isn’t really a right way. There is just a way that works for you, as is every single thing we discuss. So I started researching. And I stumbled on a couple of resources that I want to talk about, that I think can add a lot of value if you are at the beginner stage.

But also if you, maybe you are on a medium side of things. So you already have a subscriber list, but you don’t know how to use it exactly 100%. Then one of the things, one of the resources that I found that is by a gentleman called, Nicholas Erik. He speaks a lot about productivity, book marketing, and he actually wrote a couple of guides.

One was recently published like, I believe, a month ago. The Book Marketing Guide. And one of these works, Nicholas speaks a lot about how to develop your own audience. I do believe what it says to be interesting, not only for people that are starting out, but also for people that are trying to manage their newsletter, at least better. So definitely I will invite you to check what Nicholas Erik has to say about the productivity, but also how to use this productivity to make sure that you are setting up a newsletter that works for you, basically.

And since I’m talking about a newsletter, I feel like I cannot not mention a book that I came across a few weeks ago. And I’m actually going to show it. (Newsletter Ninja) It’s a small, but very, very nice book with a lovely cover. It seems like a, you know, kind of a manga, kind of style with the Ninja Japanese kind of thing. And it is by Tammi Labrecque.

And it’s all about how to use a newsletter, how to become a, what she says, an author mailing list expert. And I’m already halfway through. I’ve learned so much reading this book and I think I can’t recommend this enough. Even though I’m not, not done yet. Crystal was one of the people that suggested to me to read this like ages ago. And I was like, yeah, yeah, but there are like, so many other things that I have to read, like a thousand different books.

But because I decided to be very intentional this time on the subscriber things, so like this book was like, mentioned to me a billion times. So I was like, okay, take the plunge. You need to read this stuff.

Crystal: And you need to share the title of that book with our folks who are not watching on YouTube, so what is the book called?

Michele: It is called Newsletter Ninja, again, by Tammi Labrecque. I really hope I’m pronouncing the name correctly, and the subtitle is How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert. Again, it is super, short, super sweet. On the paperback version that I’m holding now, it’s 135/30 something pages. But again, it’s filled with stuff that is not only important, it’s also evergreen because there are things that have been know, some mailing services can maybe start now, and maybe be suspended in the future and stuff like that. But she doesn’t focus on the technicalities.

She is more like basically willing to share a philosophy. And she’s been helping a lot of authors on building new script newsletters. So I do believe this resource would be super useful if you are trying to begin your newsletter or if you are trying to maximize what you can get out of the people that are following you. Now what have you been up to, Crystal?

Crystal: Well, I am just about to make a pretty big shift, so I’m going to be a full time creative. Starting, well a couple of days before you’re all listening to this podcast actually. So I have been gearing up for making that shift. And I’ve been rereading a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work because I’m finding there is an awful lot of extra distractions right at the moment.

And you know, we’re dealing with Covid and all of the associated chaos around that. And I had been on sort of a social media hiatus for quite a while and not really paying attention to a lot of social channels, but I found myself sucked back into it was trying to keep up to date with what was happening with everything.

And so I’m just looking at how do I kind of get that under control again, and how do I stay focused and use some of this time of staying at home to get some work produced. Not just sort of panic checking my Twitter feed. So I think that book in particular has some really, really great suggestions and conversations around managing inputs in your life and how you can really focus and get down into a specific project and what that looks like.

So, I reread it cause I’ve read it- I think this is the third time, actually in the last couple of years and each time I sort of make it different types of shift. But, that one in conjunction with this other book here, which is called How to Take Smart Notes and I, will have trouble with  this name.

Sonke Ahrens—something like that. If you’re out there, if you’re listening, I’m hoping one day to get her on the podcast, so hopefully she can correct me at that point. But this book is all about how you take notes in a way that helps you to retrieve the information later and processing the information, not just copying it or underlining it or whatever.

But it’s actually like a thinking system. And I’ve been reading a lot of medium articles about something called the Zettelkasten, which was basically a thinking machine that a philosopher designed a long time ago. I won’t talk too much about it right now because we may have a whole episode on that coming up if we can convince the author of that book to come talk to us. But we have- yeah, some really interesting stuff that I’ve been looking at putting into place so that I’m going to be doing a lot more nonfiction writing. And you can see the shelves behind me if you’re looking at the video are covered in nonfiction books, which I want to be able to synthesize and process and analyze and share back some thoughts on that in a way that’s really easy to understand for everybody and in a way that gets me thinking about things in a different way as well.

So I am balancing fiction and nonfiction writing, and I really- I want to set up good systems for the nonfiction writing cause I’m looking at that as the next sort of, you know, five to seven year phase of my career; to balance the fiction and nonfiction. Now that the fiction is up and running. So that is what I have been focused on. Trying to focus on how to focus. Basically.

Michele: Always being busy anyways

About Liza Palmer

Crystal: Yes, there is no shortage of things to do. So I was really excited to reach out to Liza Palmer, who is an internationally bestselling author of nine novels, including Conversations with the Fat Girl and Nowhere but Home. She is an Emmy nominated writer who lives in Los Angeles and she works for Buzzfeed.

And so that’s kind of an interesting combination of skills. And I first met Liza at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference where she taught all kinds of workshops. I’ve been to some of her courses, which are fantastic, but she had an entire room of people sobbing after her keynote. And one of the reasons is because Liza is a very real person, which I love. She is open, she is honest about things that are hard to talk about, and she basically just goes right for the truth of the matter. And so I think in a, in a topic like social media, and there’s so much should and change and everything is happening so quickly. I think she’s got a really great perspective to share with us about life on the other side of some of the tech and how we could be using some of these things from her day job that she’s going to share with us to improve the way we are acting and interacting on the internet with our readers.

So without further ado, let’s hop on over to the interview and we will pop back at the end to do a little dissecting of the main ideas and see what we might be able to apply to our own lives for the next week or so.

Today, we have Ms Liza Palmer here who is author extraordinaire, writer of many things, and also a knower of tech stuff, which is not always an obvious pairing in this particular industry. So, uh, Liza, can you first tell folks listening and watching us out there in the wider world a little bit about who you are and why you’re here?

Liza Palmer: Thank you for having me. My name is Liza. I am in Los Angeles. I had been writing—I sold my first book in 2003. I have eight novels; standalones, working on nine now. I’ve written two novels for Marvel: The Captain Marvel prequel YA and the novelization for Infinity War. And I also write for animation. Spiderman tends to be the one I get put on most. So it’s definitely—and I am the supervising writer at Buzzfeed. So it’s quite a, quite a diverse portfolio.

Crystal: Yeah. And my personal favourite thing is that your history as pop-up maker extraordinaire. That just hits me right in my youth, right there.

Liza Palmer: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I worked on it when they brought it back. So I worked on pop up video. I kind of did a lot of the aging diva content. So at that time I did a lot of Madonna, a lot of Mariah Carey, a lot of Whitney. That was kind of my wheelhouse.

Crystal: Excellent. And I’m curious, do you think that mapped onto a facility for short form stuff like, I mean, popups and Twitter really not so far apart, when you think about that, right?

Liza Palmer: It’s so interesting. It’s actually the, the, the place that it actually came up recently, it was, this is not going to- every writer is going to understand this, but it’s no one else will. I write for, there is a show on the internet called Unsolved. It is basically these two, men who go and they find supernatural stuff, like they’ll go to the old town jail and there’s like ghosts and stuff like that.

But another thing that’s on that channel, it’s a Buzzfeed channel. It’s all about true crime and stuff like that- is a series we do called how they were caught where. We script out basically how serial killers were caught. And it’s actually great cause it’s like Ted Bundy and all the kind of stuff. Not great, but it’s, it’s a great angle to take it from. Dark, incredibly dark content.

But we have to write them. And what helped me write them was, and now the language is, people actually call the text things ‘pops’ because of me, because it is these runs where it’s like, it’s not- you’re not building 50 facts in a row, you’re building five facts, five facts. It’s like these little arcs of facts and, and that chops it down so that you don’t actually have to think about how to how to write the whole story.

You just have to write the story of this and then this and that. And so oddly, the biggest thing, the biggest one for one has been pop up to scripts about serial killers are very similar. So it’s very bizarre. But that’s how it works, right?

That makes absolute sense to every writer. Yeah, exactly. It’s a structured thing, cause I think it is like how am I structuring this? How am I getting my head around this? And then so- you kind of put things together that in no other way should be together. But that’s how it came out.

Crystal: The perfect writerly activity.

Liza Palmer: Exactly. Yeah. Serial killers and Mariah Gary.

Crystal: Yeah. Perfect. Perfect combo. So one of the things that comes up a lot in talking to writers and that people always have questions about is, okay, social media was buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, all of the things, and there’s so many platforms and there’s so much you could learn or know or do.

It’s kind of, you know how much is enough, I guess is kind of an ongoing question. And I know it’s not always an area authors are super comfortable playing around in, and it can be kind of loaded depending on your social media personality versus your writerly personality, like if you write for kids or adults or whatever.

So I feel like there’s a lot of interesting areas we can go down in terms of just talking a bit about if authors are trying to make strategic decisions about where they’re going with social media, what does that look like? But I know that you have kind of an inside view into what is going on right now in social media.

So not what people are talking about from five years ago, but the actual current situation. So could you maybe share a few of the insights or like, interesting tidbits that you think maybe aren’t sort of commonly out there in the world at this point?

What’s going on in social media right now?

Liza Palmer: Yeah, I think, you know, I’ve been working at Buzzfeed now for five years, and I think watching the trends move away from kind of YouTube and more to these kind of more-

They’re not boutique platforms, but it feels like that, right? Like you get what stores in the mall Instagram is. Like, you know what store that is, you know what Facebook is, and as writers, it’s basically our job to figure out what those audiences, what each platform says about an audience. Correct? So I think for me, one of the biggest learnings I had, there’s two, and it’s, and one of them was at the social media conference that I went to where this kid, I mean, first he was like 12 years old and he owned a company for like five, I don’t even know-

But he basically said that one of the, one of the pitfalls of social media or being online at all is something that he called trying to “boil the ocean”, which is. It’s taking something super broad and basically trying to do everything for everyone. And that’s never going to work. Because you are trying to boil the ocean instead of saying, I’m going to take this bucket of water out of the ocean and then boil that and I’m piggybacking off that is one of the, this is, I bring this up all the time in every meeting.

There was a wonderful Buzzfeed writer named Sam Stryker. And he basically said that the best, the best post he ever did- and, and this is huge numbers, right? Cause it’s Buzzfeed and all that kind of stuff was a story that he did about Taylor Swift and how she held her purse. And it was the same. He was like, wow, why that?

Like I’ve written everything, but what it was, and it actually piggybacks off the boil the ocean thing is it was an incredibly specific angle to something that everybody knew. So it was drilling down on something as opposed to having an article about Taylor Swift. It was, I’m going to write about how Taylor Swift holds her purse and why she holds it like that, and it went viral.

So I think for us it’s about not trying to boil the ocean. It’s about us trying to be incredibly intentional about each platform and A, whether or not it’s for you. Is your audience on that platform? There is, I can state with pretty much, okay, clear- none of my audiences are TikTok. I know none of my other- I need to know TikTok cause I need to understand what it is or my job.

But I don’t need to go on TikTok. My audience is not on there. So I think the first question you need to ask is, “where is my audience?” Which social media platform is my audience on? And then I think you start there, but you don’t need to go and do everything. You’re going to- it’s boiling the ocean and you’re not going to do it well.

Crystal: For sure. And so I know just cause we have to slip this in here is what is ‘TikTok’? Because a lot of people, that’s something that they’re like hearing and a lot of people who write for younger audiences are like, ‘do I need to be on TikTok?’

Liza Palmer: Well it’s actually- TikTok is actually very simple. I think it’s incredibly- it’s got a high barrier of entry, I think, because it appears so manic. I think it just like, it’s so fast. Essentially, it’s a retread of Vine, which was a, a platform back in the day where it was just these little six second videos. But essentially it’s just Instagram stories.

That’s all it is. It’s just basically- and if you really want to kind of unpack it, it’s just silent movies. It’s what can you do in six seconds and what can you show and not tell in six seconds? That’s it. And it’s just, it’s, it’s a community of Gen Z’ers. What works on TikTok is something called “purposely unpolished”, which means- at Buzzfeed, we can’t put our shows on there.

They don’t like that. But if we put a cell phone vlog behind the scenes of a show, that works. So if you’re trying to put stuff on TikTok, it’s unpolished, it’s vlogs, it’s observations, it’s funny stuff, it’s commentary, it’s your commentary on something. It is not polished at all. It’s literally a behind the scenes thing. Most of the time.

Crystal: I mean, it feels like it’s more like a conversation you would have with a friend and it’s one ping pong bounce of a conversation is like, Oh, I heard this funny thing today, and then you’d tell a little like two second clip of something, or whatever. But it’s very much, it’s, it’s real. And I think that’s an interesting thing when you’re talking about unpolished, it’s very much.

Because right now we’re so used to stock photos and everything is perfect. And to the point where a lot of advertisers and a lot of folks making images for social- in different places are actually purposely like  making a tooth crooked or they’re actually marking up the stock photos to make sure that they don’t look too perfect because people are just not attending to perfect. It’s not interesting.

Liza Palmer: No, no. It’s that relatable content thing. And I think it’s even to the thing with, you know, Lady Gaga’s video, the Stupid Love, one that just came out with a shot on, I mean, they say shot on an iPhone, and I think it’s a, I think it’s the stills from it, but having something be effortlessly- that kind of purposely unpolished thing is now kind of something to be proud of. Yeah.

Crystal: Which is awesome news for authors. I think one of the big barriers to entry for people really feeling comfortable putting themselves out there is, like I don’t feel prefect, my writing doesn’t feel perfect.

Liza Palmer: Life isn’t perfect. Exactly.

Crystal: Yeah. I can’t, I can’t make these beautiful things that these, you know, professionals have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases for. And you don’t need to, right? That’s not what people are looking for. So, so besides ‘don’t boil the ocean’ and ‘don’t be perfect’, what else is coming out of your learnings from your social conference adventure?

Liza Palmer:  I mean, it’s so interesting. I think it’s like, it’s that thing where, and we see it in publishing all the time where there’s this kind of trend chasing that happens all the time.

But I do think that, I think the overall take away from what we keep learning over and over again is authenticity is key. That’s like a, it really is like a little black dress of social media. It’s like if you’re just yourself, that’s going to hit every time. And it’s like, we’ve all had those authors that we follow, that you can see them running through the trends in their social media, and it just doesn’t feel organic to them.

And it certainly doesn’t feel organic to you as the audience. And I think that’s the biggest thing that we have to kind of weigh. It’s like, yes, that’s a trend out there. Is it a trend for your audience? Probably not. You know, it’s, I think that’s the key to kind of following these trends, which is like, does my audience- do they know this? Would they like this?

And then it’s almost like, how can I iterate or adapt that that trend to my audience? Right? It’s like, cause I think those questions are, it’s never a one for one. Ever. It doesn’t work like that. So I, I think the biggest takeaway is just know your audience and be yourself. Yeah. I understand why they’re coming to you, why they read your books, what, how are they engaging with you?

The intimacy is not with you and the trends. It’s with you and your audience and understanding that relationship instead of kind of the general trends moving. Cause those are going to keep moving. It’s basically just be yourself and figure out how to, how to serve your audience.

Crystal: Yeah. So two interesting things there. I think one is, you know, in any relationship, if all you do is talk about yourself, that that is not a genuine connection with another person. You are not demonstrating that you care about them or you are interested in thinking, knowing what they think or, or want, or what are their hopes and dreams are, you know, what’s going on in their lives.

And so if we look at social as that relationship with a reader, not just, here’s a platform for me to bless my spammy marketing messages out. And I think we all get that on an academic level, but I also think we don’t always understand what that looks like in terms of, you know you’re not diluting your brand as an author if you share someone else’s book.

So, you know, and so this is interesting mindset that some people have about social, where it’s like, well. You know, like, I can’t come up with content. It’s like, what do you mean? You know, like a hundred authors, you know, in your genre. You could, all you could do is announce when your friends had books out and you would have an endless supply of content. And if it’s in your genre, your readers are then entertained. If they like the books you’re recommending, then they start to trust you. It’s the no light trust factor. You’re building relationships.

So I think that’s just the- a freeing way for people to think about it is to take the pressure off. You don’t have to be a one woman or man show or whatever. We don’t have to be a one person show or one author show, right? You, you can promote other people’s, and one of the interesting offshoots of that is, you know, some people are like, well, I’m not promoting other people in my newsletter because. My, readers have signed up to hear from me, and I’m like, well, yeah, but don’t you also want your Also Boughts to be other authors that you want to be associated with?

So if you want to switch your brain over from like, selfish mode or what do I get out of doing that nice thing for someone else besides just the good karma points. You actually get then, relevant content for your readers. They’re pleased that you have some connection there. You’ve got something to talk about.

You can be like, Oh, who did you love in this book? Or how, you know, tell me another book that’s like this, that you enjoy it and then they send you back content. So that’s just an interesting way to kind of twist that around.

Liza Palmer: I think it’s also that 360 view, right? Which is like, it is that thing, which is like, what is your audience coming to you for?

They like how you tell stories. Right? And it’s also a taste thing, but it’s also-I don’t know anybody more amazing than somebody who’s trying to be excited about a book they love. I really don’t. I love it. I love, I mean, we always, you know, we go to the same conference every year together, and I swear like when I leave there, I have this list of books that people are excited about and I love it.

It’s just like life it, I mean, I think that is the thing. I think social media has been a bit shifted. But it is really like life. It should be you talking to your friends. You talking to your audience is exactly the same. If there’s a book that you love, tell people about it. I personally don’t talk about things that I don’t like simply because it’s not something that interests me.

I like talking. I like lifting and signal boosting more than kind of shitting on. So I think it’s, but that’s a personal choice that I made. But why wouldn’t you want to yell from the rooftops about both that you love? I don’t think there’s any more magnetic than that. I really don’t.

Crystal: Yeah, and I mean, our mammas weren’t wrong. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Liza Palmer: It’s just not interesting

Crystal: And it really is just your opinion on a thing. It is not the truth of that thing. And so let the people who are relating to it go off and relate to it and do their thing and you just focus on bringing in more of what you want. For sure.

And I think something that you said, when we were talking about the, the conference originally was one of those messages that, you know, as content makers, we are not the heroes of the story. We are the help. Yeah. So let’s, let’s unpack that a little bit cause I think that’s a really interesting point of view for folks to have.

Liza Palmer: Cause I think it’s almost like it’s, I think the first thing you have to do is actually kind of audit how you are a user of that platform. And I’ll speak to Instagram cause it’s kind of my favorite platform that I’m on. I think it’s like I look at the followers that I really, really enjoy, and I’ll give you a few.

There’s one, there’s a woman called Elizabeth Menchilli. She wrote a book called the Italian Table. Her entire feed is just her walking around Italy eating amazing stuff. And it literally is,  oh my God. The other people that I love following is, I’m a man named Rene Redzepi, who is the, he was the guy who opened up the restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma. It’s this amazing restaurant that I went to last summer.

And basically what I go to them for is, I want that version of myself. Right? Like I want that expanded version of myself that they are the help, trying to get me to see myself as somebody who wanders around Italy, you know, sitting, standing in a bar and drinking a coffee that’s definitely too bitter for me. But I’m like, maybe one day. And Rene Redzepi is, you know, he does Noma, but for the last three months, him and his family have been doing this like, amazing. Global tasting. So they’re on the Yucatan right now and he’s eating mango and like he’s putting lime on it and chili powder and it’s like your mouth is just- and it is that expanded version of myself that he is helping me see.

So I’m the hero of his content, not him. He’s just helping me see myself in this kind of expanded way. And I think if we start seeing our content like that, which is like- the first thing you have to do is figure out who your audience is. That’s everything that Buzzfeed does. We are 100% focused on the audience.

So first of all, it’s who does your audience want to be? And that’s another thing that you can actually really look at in your characters. What characters are they engaging with? Who do they love? Why do they love them? Is it because that character doesn’t say the things that they want to do? Then that’s what they’re trying to look for in your content as well.

And I think that’s, that’s the ship, which is, if you start thinking about your content, about being about your audience instead of you, that one pivot is going to change everything.

Crystal: Yeah, and I think one of the blocks people have a lot that they mentioned. Is that you know, when you get in this bubble where you know other authors and that it’s mostly who you’re surrounded by.

Our daily life is not interesting because it’s what we do every day, right? We, we get the familiarity breeds contempt- one of the phrases. That’s what happens is we wake up and we write stuff and we read things and we talked to other authors and we go to book launches and that is our life, which, you know, we forget how awesome that is.

Not everyone has that access. And not everybody writes books. And not everybody lives in their imagination with a whole bunch of people that they created. So the things we take for granted are the things that are actually quite interesting. Maybe other people want to live in that imaginary world with us.

Maybe they want to live in the author world with us. They don’t just want perfect books to gram stacks of completed books. They want to know like, how did it get to be like that, right? Like when you’re somebody looking in from the outside, you need to know how do I get from here to there because here there is too far to jump. We know that, right? Like there’s gotta be 50 pops. Like you were saying before,

Where are the smaller arcs? And if you don’t let people in to see that you, you don’t have any way to bring them along with you or for them to really understand you and as an author, like if people are a little bit in the process with you, they’re also going to be a lot more understanding if something happens and you’re like, this story is not ready to be in the world yet. Like it needs a little bit more time to cook. You can, you can do that, right? It’s a relationship. You have built a relationship with your readers and you have some flexibility in how that looks and how that works,

Liza Palmer: But I think it’s also, it’s also kind of drilling down onto what- why you followed that person in the first place. Right? So it’s like, and if you look at Elizabeth Minchilli and Rene Redzepi, they’re actually a very good example of: Elizabeth Minchilli wrote a book called the Italian Table. That’s why people are coming to her. So her feed is all about Italy, right? It’s all about exactly what- it’s an extension of her work, right?

And there is all this other stuff, but the primary goal is I like this thing and now you’re giving me more of that thing. And it’s the same thing with Rene Redzepi. I went to Noma and I was like, Oh my God, what is happening here? This person who started this is a genius, and then his feed is like:

Here’s a behind the scenes of my genius, essentially, like you wanted to know more about what goes into making Noma, Noma. Here. Here is me tasting this mango. This is how I see it here is me sitting at a sushi counter that nobody can get into, and I got access. It’s that thing that you were talking about, which is that behind the scenes access of this incredible journey as this thing that you get to do, but I do think it’s like, what is it that your audience wants from you?

And I think it’s like the scavenger hunt is looking at your work, right? Which is like, what do they like about your, about. What you do, right? If I followed Rene Redzepi and he was like, here, let me talk about…let me talk about, you know, um, I dunno, I, I even like the examples I’m having, like woodworking.

I’m like, I would watch Rene Redzepi do woodworking. Like, it’s like, I, that doesn’t work, you know? But I do think it’s like making sure to understand why your audience followed you in the first place and then understanding what content stands on the shoulders of what, what made them quick follow in the first place, I think is the biggest example.

Crystal: So if we look at like a couple of different tones or approaches you could take, let’s say, um, well, yeah, we can use me as an example. So small town series romance, right? It’s contemporary fiction. People actually mostly don’t care about me at all. They want to know about what’s going on in the town and the characters they’ve got attached to and everything else.

And so if it is a reader focused social platform, it isn’t even really about me connecting with them at all. It’s not about what’s going on in my life. There’s like, like you said, there’s snippets of that, but really they want town gossip. They want recipes the characters used in the book. They want to know what’s coming, who’s story do they get next? You know? There’s that neat mixture, I think of just shifting the gaze a little bit.

Liza Palmer:  But I think it’s also, they like how you tell a story. They like your observations, they like your commentaries. Like if you were at a Starbucks and you were positive, the two people behind you are on their first date, I would want you to live tweet that. Right? Cause it’s how you tell the story. Right? Cause it’s also like even in your own life, it’s not necessarily, look at all this cool shit I have, it’s look at how I observed the world. Because you like how I sit around a campfire and tell a story.

So is that because I think for me, it’s like you said, writers sit at desks and we just, it’s not interesting. Right? What is interesting is our ability to tell a story. That’s what’s interesting. So every opportunity that you can find to tell a story. So that’s why, like my mom has this crazy dog and these, this little French bulldog and-

And I was like, I don’t have anything interesting in my life. It’s not, you know, it’s like me and my commute. I’ll talk about podcasts or whatever it is, but it’s like essentially, I was like, if people like how I turn a phrase, then let me take a picture of this dog and put some funny words underneath him.

Like it was like stuff like that where it was me thinking why people follow me and if they follow me for because I’m funny, or I tell a story, then that’s the content I’m going to give them, you know? Smattering with me at a book launch because that’s my access, right? Like that’s also me as an expert, as a book writer.

And so it’s like trying to figure out- I think everybody who’s kind of studied social media in every way understands that there’s kind of- what they talk about is that you have these kinds of pillars, right? Which is like, if you look at your social media, you have pillars of, I think mine would be like, oddly, like architecture and renovation, which is something that I think I’ve started doing. Access, meaning my world in Los Angeles and book people. And then what else? Like maybe like dogs. I mean, it’s like, what can you count on. As like appointment television on my feed and what are the- it’s like, I think it is that thing, which is like when you turn on HGTV, they have these pillars of content.

And I think if you look at your own, social media is almost a network. What are you offering as far as like, these are the four things you’re going to get on here. You know?

Crystal: All the cocktails…

Liza Palmer: I would watch that! Like, cause it’s the same thing like Elizabeth Menchilli. She’s like, here’s my daily coffee thing. And then she did these stories where she actually made coffee the Italian way, and I was like, Oh my God. It was the perfect expansion of her daily coffee photo. And then like every morning she starts and she puts a photo of Rome and she puts the date in the corner, every morning and it’s been incredible. And not for nothing.

Like during all the kind of the challenges right now with Italy, I know that I can get a certain piece of information from this person who has boots on the ground who actually like earned my respect knowing that she couldn’t tell me the truth about what’s happening in Italy right now. So it does expand beyond just these kinds of first forays into why I’m following somebody.

Crystal: Yeah. And I think something else that’s interesting is that, you know, you’re not just following other authors. And I think that’s a trap that a lot of people into is, you know, you get on social media, you connect with all these other authors, but then in this feedback loop and you’re not connecting over areas of interest in other ways.

Like you’re looking to expand your network not just talk to people who are into the same thing as you in the same way as you and have this closed loop. You know, that’s like the kids in high school, standing in a closed circle in the hallway talking about, you know, something they all love. For me that I was a band geek, so it could have been band, it could have been student council. We were huddling in the hallway for safety. Right. It has its place, but this is not it. Like if your goal is to connect with your readers, your readers have all kinds of different interests and really you want to be connected to people who are super passionate and excited about whatever it is they’re into.

Cause you’re going to learn from them. You’re going to connect with them in different ways. You’re going to see how they are connecting with people. You’re going to just broaden your social horizons in a way.

Liza Palmer: Exactly. You’re going to see it done well and you’re going to see, it doesn’t matter. Like two of my favourite follows is this couple in, I believe they’re in the Lakes District in England. It’s a guy named Adam Pritchett and his partner is Matt- Something, (Matt Hayton) but it’s AJ Pritchett and FawnLorn are there two- AJ Pritcherr is a sewer. And FawnLorn, he makes art and little sculpted figurines. And together, it’s hypnotic. It’s like all you do. And they have these little photos of just them, like doing the thing. And then I know every Sunday they go on a crazy walk. Like I know that every Sunday I’m going to get walk content of like them in the middle Lake Moore and like, why are you walking in the snow like that?

I don’t even know. And it’s something where it’s like, it’s so organic and so authentic for them, and this is their life and they’re makers. And watching them kind of navigate social media and shows their, quite frankly, very small life. It feels big because it’s like these huge walks in their art and how they’re kind of, how they’re- it’s wonderful.

I ordered something from AJ Pritchett. I ordered this beautiful thing- you also should be following people of other races, other cultures, everything. It’s fun. You know, it’s like having your feed-I think that’s another thing. Like I, I’ve been thinking about a lot because I think the thing that people forget about social media is that social media should be boosting your human experience too.

Meaning, cause I think for us, for me especially, Twitter started taking more than it was giving for me, and I’ve been trying to take a step back from it simply because it became a symbiotic, unhealthy relationship of me trying to get out of writing and me just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling aimlessly and getting madder and madder and doing all of that stuff.

So I think there is this other element where, yes, social media should boost you, and this is where you’re going to have find your community. And this is where you’re gonna connect with readers, but you’re also a human being who should be following people that make you happy. And also it should be not taking away from your time and energy so that you’re not writing.

It shouldn’t be this kind of zero sum game of this thing that I started to boost my writing is now taking the time and energy that I should be using writing. And so I do think having that, and turning your feet into something that you totally enjoy and stop following the writer that makes you feel bad.

Stop following the writer that is you’re envious of. And every single time they post something, it sends you into a rage blackout. It’s like stop. And I know that there are people that you have to follow. Mute them. I went on a muting binge, and I’m so happy for it. It’s like I get that you can’t follow, you can’t unfollow certain people.

Just because of politics or whatever it is. They  you met at a conference and now you’re like, I don’t want to make it weird, but you can mute them and you can also just like, I log out of Twitter every single time I go on, so it hit, there’s a barrier of entry that if I’m mindlessly scrolling, I can’t barrier of entry that.

That like I can’t just go on Twitter and I put it- all of our stuff is two-step variation verification, so I have to like enter in a code and all that kind of stuff. It’s just hard enough that I don’t do it so. I think all that stuff is about social media should be giving to your writing and not taking away. And I think that’s also a big factor.

Crystal: Yeah, for sure. I, so about two and a half years ago, I read Deep Work by Cal Newport-have you not read that?

Liza Palmer: No, I’m writing it down right now.

Crystal: Oh my word. Okay. So, yeah. And as you can see, it’s this yellow one right behind me. For those of you listening, I am now holding up a copy of the book.

Crystal: This is, as all you can see: I have hundreds of stickies and I scribbled the heck out of the insides as I do. So, one of the things he talks about is doing a digital fast basically, or a digital cleanse. I had not really been writing and I had got like sucked into this social media space and I was connecting with people in all of these things and it was great except that I wasn’t writing anything and I decided I was going to do the 40 by 40 challenge, which was insane, but also meant I needed to basically not have television, kill Netflix like, and I couldn’t-

Liza Palmer: What’s the 40-40 thing? I don’t know that.

Crystal: Oh my 40 by 40 was I wanted to have 40 books published by my 40th birthday.

Liza Palmer: Oh wow. Crystal. That’s amazing

Crystal: Yeah. Well there were supposed to be a lot of short stories, and I have a lot of kids’ books already. Like, you know, I was starting from like 25 or whatever.

Liza Palmer: As you do. You would!

Figuring out where you want to hang out on socials

Crystal: It was fairly insane. So I was like, well, I need to figure out how to focus basically, and I need to get this social media thing under control. And what he said was like, you just kill everything for 30 days. You pin a post and you say like, Hey guys, I’m on a little bit of a focus binge here for 30 days. I’ll see at the end of that. And so you just shut everything down so you don’t delete your accounts. You can just leave them on pause and log out of them. I removed all social from my phone.

Liza Palmer: Me too.

Crystal: I removed my email from my phone.

Liza Palmer: Oh wow!

Crystal: Yeah. And cause I was like, I usually can’t properly answer an email from my phone anyway.

Liza Palmer: You’re so right!

Crystal: And then you have to go back to it, which if you subscribe to the whole Getting Things Done, David Allen, you know, philosophy. You touch it once. You touch it, you deal with it, you file it, you whatever. That’s another interesting book.

Liza Palmer: David Allen? What’s that? What’s that one?

Crystal: Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Liza Palmer: This is actually a thing that I think should be a pillar of your social media. You know, so much about this stuff that I actually think that if you had a day where you were like, here’s my book of the week, I would be…I would just be eating that up.

Crystal: Yeah, so I think it’s stuff like that too. And it’s those organic conversations with other people in your life who knows smart stuff. Cause cool people are out there. You gotta just see what comes back to you and, and if you’re not sure what your pillars are, ask a friend or family to put a post. Like if you’re on Instagram, post on Instagram and just say, what are my pillars? You know, scroll back through your feed. What is it?

Liza Palmer:  Oh, I think one of the biggest kind of learning I’ve had at Buzzfeed actually is that the currency of success is not views or clicks. It’s engagement and watch retention. Which is, so if you’re looking at the Instagram post that got the most likes, that’s actually not the most currency. Your best Instagram posts should be the one that got the most comments. Because that means that your audience is engaging with you. And that’s actually a much more-

A bigger signal than of anything than just somebody clicking like. It takes a lot more to kind of comment on it and engage. The trophy is shares, right? It’s like, because what that says is “this speaks to me”, and “I relate to this and this”. It’s the ultimate “This is so me”. And so if you’re creating content that people share, that means they’re looking at it as an extension of identity, which is actually the real currency.

So I think when you’re are doing that audit of what your pillars are, it’s not what got the most likes. It’s what got the most engagement.

Crystal: Yeah. So something else to think about here is, there’s a big shift in sort of SEO for bloggers, for content creators of all kinds. There’s so much noise out there that there’s an interesting shift towards quality over quantity.

So in terms of blog posts, like a lot of people are actually cleaning out all of their blog histories. We went through this phase of like, everything is like 300 words and you need to watch every single day and five times. And I feel like we’re really shifting away from that. So I don’t know if you can talk a little bit about whatever relevant stuff came up over the last little while for that. Like, what do you see, how could we authors put that to work for us in a good way?

Liza Palmer: I mean, I think the first example is one that actually was at that social media conference. Lego did this thing where on their website, if you go to Lego, they have actually based on, you know, cookies and all this kind of stuff.

They know their audience well enough that essentially it, it’s the same thing that another, I think at Everlane, I think another a clothing company does, which is like, they know what you’ve ordered. And so it’s not about whether or not everything is in stock. It’s whether or not those black pants that you keep buying is in stock.

So they give you already a honed down version of, these are actually the 12/20 things that you’re probably going to like anyway, and if you come to Lego and I give you literally all of the Legos, you’re going to turn off because it’s too much. Yeah. So I think it is that thing is once again, that boil the ocean. You can’t boil the ocean with, I have a website, I have this, I have this, I have this, I have this, here’s all this content.

It’s like, no. For me, I did the same thing you did. I deleted my blog. I went through and deleted all of my tweets, I think I only have like a hundred tweets total. And I’ve been on Twitter since 2009. I actually go through and Donald Glover actually started doing this on Instagram where he actually cleans his entire grid of Instagram orderly and starts new.

And I do think a lot of that is very true. It’s cause if you go back, a lot of your tweets are actually, they’re not like scandalous or anything, they’re just incredibly relational to what’s happening at the time and are no longer- it is kind of a sell by date where it kind of went a little rotten in the sense of, I don’t know what this is about anymore.

So I went to TweetDelete, and I actually deleted thousands of Twitter- and you can archive it and you can get them back. It was just boring, actually quite boring. But it is that thing where it’s like, I actually want control over how I am seeing on the internet.

And so it is very intentional about where I am. So I can give you the best content native to that platform. Also, this goes back to the thing of, you only have so many hours in a day, and for a lot of us, it’s, you only have so many seconds in the day. It’s not even an hour, an hour. I would be like “woohoo!” if I had a full hour.

But it is that thing of how much time and resources are you going to put to try to boil the ocean to get no signal, where if you build something on Instagram very specifically, you can actually engage that audience in a meaningful way. So I knew- I got off Facebook as well, so I don’t have anything on Facebook.

And that was my first kind of big intentionality. I deleted the blog, I deleted all my tweets, and I’m slowly kind of getting off of Twitter. And now I know that Instagram is kind of where I want to be the most. Because I think my brand of storytelling is the best on Instagram. I know that I can give people the best content on that.

And that actually started with trying to figure out what it was that you want, what my audience wanted. And that’s why every Saturday I do these goofy renovation tours with my mom and it becomes this appointment television and it’s fun and it disappears in 24 hours. I tend to not put a lot of stuff on my grid because I think the temporariness of the stories is actually better. And that’s actually proven out in data. Stories are actually where it’s at. People tend to not look at the grid as much, which is really shocking, but that actually is born out in data at Buzzfeed.

So I do think it is about trying not to boil the ocean and trying to be very specific and intentional with where and how you’re reaching your audience and you can’t do that if it’s in 20 different places.

Crystal: Yeah, for sure. So, so far to recap some highlights: definitely no way your audience is-

Liza Palmer: Sorry

Crystal: No, that’s good. I’m just like, you know, running along and for my brain, I like to process things in like handy little lists. So yeah. So we want to focus in like, find where your audience is, because ultimately it’s about them.

So which platform are they on? Right. And which a tool resonates with you. Right? Cause that’s another piece. And ideally those are going to be similar, but you probably have multiple choices, like most audiences are in a couple of places. And so you can pick the one that feels the best to you. Sort of doing things on your own terms, so authentic to you, but also filling the need of your life right now.

Like if you are in a crazy busy space in your life and you have like three hours a month that you can dedicate to this writing career thing that you’ve got going on. You can’t be spending those on Twitter. You need to be writing your freaking book. So there’s a certain amount of just prioritizing the thing that’s actually going to leverage results for you in something that’s going to have an ongoing good impact on your life, your world, your career, all of those things.

I think curating your own feeds is super important. So we do, like in the Creative Academy, we do quarterly planning retreats. And so at the beginning of each quarter, we, we plan a 12 week year. And so we look at it as a fresh start every 12 weeks.

And so you can come in, you can do your planning, and then you can review your social habits and your platforms and your content in light of those goals, like if you have switched tracks, maybe you hops to a different genre, maybe whatever, all that stuff. Drawing people to the wrong spot, that’s like building a bunch of street signs that point you to the wrong direction.

Like that isn’t going to help people easily find and connect with you over the right topics. So I do think that curation thing is super interesting. So if we’re looking at applying, so the 80 20 rule is something I’ve been working with through a course I’ve been doing. And if we’re looking at like in the context of social, what do you think would be a good application of that 80 20 rule. Like what are the 20% of activities that get the most results in terms of engagement or book sales? Like you said, the grid, not so much, but Instagram stories. Yes.

So if we’re looking at Instagram, then we’re getting a lot more impact for time spent in stories. Is there anything else from other platforms that you would highlight?

Liza Palmer: I think it goes back to that saying, which is like, it works if you work it. Right. Which is like if you’re part of the community and you’re actually experiencing Instagram as an audience person, as much as somebody who creates content, you’re going to get the flow of information, you’re going to be part of the community.

I remember it was Mark Duplass, I think in his South by Southwest. His keynote in South by Southwest is incredible. But the one thing he has is if you come at something and it’s usually like a person or a community, asking for a favor, you’re going to get nothing. If you come at a community asking for community, you’re going to get everything. And I think it is that thing which is like, okay, I’m going to be on Instagram and I’m going to crack Instagram and I’m going to sell my book on this.

It’s like, no, everybody can smell that a mile away and it’s not going to be organic. It’s not going to be authentic. Go on Instagram. See how you like it. Do you like it? I follow so many foodies and gardeners and you know, all this kind of, it’s and my feed and who I am looks like a real person because I’m experiencing Instagram organically.

I’m actually on there cause I like it. So I think it is first and foremost that 20%, a lot of that should be you experiencing the platform as a user. So that you can actually know what it’s like and what you like, and then you can do that thing where you can audit your own likes. Because that, I think more than anything-

Dollars to donuts, if you’re following somebody who’s just spamming you with their own stuff, you unfollow them, and that actually is evidence that you should be taking of how you create content. If you’re just spamming people with, you know, my book, my book, my book, my book. That’s not a full user. But I also think that women, especially, we over-correct that, and then when we do actually have something to sell, we’re like this ol’ thing.

It’s like, no, you can actually say, I’m super proud of this. Here’s a link. And this whole week is going to be book launch stuff. So strap in. It’s like, I think it’s actually totally fine to be like on launch week, it’s all about launch week. But I do think that it’s organic. I always like, when I’m in the back before reading, I’ll always post a photo of like me with my Pepto Bismal and tea and all that kind of stuff.

So it is that behind the scenes look at what a launch week looks like. And I did actually a Twitter thread about how I tried to kind of do all these things in launch week, and it was like, that’s not how it works because you’re very tender during launch week and you can’t actually go to the doctor and go get global entry and still be like, cognizant of those things.

So I do think it is about using the platform as a user and looking at it as a community and that being your North star for how to kind of govern yourself on there. Not “what can I get out of Instagram”? It’s like, yeah, they’re going to see you coming a mile away.

Crystal: Yeah. To go back to our ocean metaphor for all of it. I mean, yeah, we can take a bucket out of it, but also the social platforms are like beaches. If you’re a surfer, you can, you can be like, Oh, I don’t see the perfect wave here. You’ve dipped your toes in the water, so you drive to another beach and then you find out the, the waves up over on the other one you just left and so you run back. But like now nobody knows who you are because you haven’t been hanging out. But if you just get in the water, you sit on your board, you talk to all the people around you, you watch, you see what the waves are doing. Eventually the right waves going to come along and you’re all going to go together.

Very like that, that there are these ebbs and flows to the patterns and seasons of social media. And so it really is just like, where am I going to hang out with my friends? What feels right? So I’m with you on the Instagram. I love Instagram. It just feels like me taking pictures and I think it makes me look at things a different way.

Like if I’m out for my walk, I notice cool stuff in a way that I don’t just, I’m not thinking about framing it. Like I might not know just that one Crocus or, you know, the car driving past with the really funny sign on it when I pause to take a drink of water at the corner at the stop light, like, you know, stuff like that. Or I make it a mission. How many little neighborhood libraries can I find?

Liza Palmer: I love that!

Crystal: Because I live in a fairly residential area with all these little, like, I call them birdhouse libraries, but yeah. So, that’s fun. But just bringing it as an add on to your daily life. Not as like, here’s 50 more things to put on my to do list and you know, and then feeling the complete overwhelm that comes with that.

Liza Palmer: Agreed. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Crystal: So, I am going to ask you one more question, just a fun little random thing to throw in the mix. And what I’m going to ask you is if you could get into a time machine, and you could travel to any point in your writerly life, when would you go to and what would you tell yourself?

Advice for your past self

Liza Palmer: Oh, okay. I think this actually, there’s like that thing of the bottom line is I wouldn’t have listened to anything I would have said anyway. Like is that thing where it’s like. I do think it’s, we learn what we learn. It’s the same thing in books that we know that are heroes and heroines, you know, they learn what they learn when they learn it, and people tried to tell them that before. But I think the biggest thing was when this all started, I think back in 2003, if I could just have held- I don’t think I learned that I was good enough. Or that the way that I told stories or even the stories that I told we’re valuable.

And I still struggle with that. I think also because society tells us that stories for and about women are somehow less than, and not as important. It’s not like I’m getting this from, I’m making this out of whole cloth. I think that’s absolutely what women get told. But I think just going back to the beginning and saying that the stories that I’m telling are important.

And the readers who love them need these stories. And I think kind of holding onto that throughout. Because I think in the beginning maybe it was a bet better, but maybe like, 2008 or 2009 I would’ve gone back there. I think cause that’s when the troubles happened. It started happening, and even, I mean, this is the story of a career, 2008, 2009 then in 2014 and then in 2015, it’s this, right?

So I think the time machine would have been, would have been popular with me, but going back every time I doubted myself, it’d be like a daily trip.

Crystal: Exactly!

Liza Palmer: Every day, it’s like “You again? Jeez. Today I’m not doing well? I thought I was doing okay!”

Crystal: Or like Beam me up Scotty, like just help me out, here!

Liza Palmer: Over and over and over again. Just this again. This again? You again? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, every day I would have told myself I was good enough.

Crystal: Well, and you are fantastic. And I’m going to say that loud and proud. So what you can’t see, there was one row of my bookshelf, which is like blocked because of the camera angle and the way it sits in my desk. But that top row is actually-and I should move it down so it’s in view, but it’s all books written by my friends basically, and so Liza has a section of the cube with some beautiful, beautiful stories and so many of whom, if you are, if you are a foodie out there and you were like drooling over the Instagram feeds, there’s a handful of chef characters in there also, you may want to check out.

Liza Palmer: And there’s another one coming up in book nine.

Crystal: Yeah. So if people want to find your, your books and your stuff, where should they connect with you?

Liza Palmer: I have my website and I think it does have all of the kind of- everything you need to know about all the books. And then I think I’m, like I said, I’m most active on Instagram.

And Twitter I actually- cause I have a luxury in that Buzzfeed has a Slack room. Like Slack is actually like an inner office chat app, and they literally have a Slack room that says great tweets. And so I literally get the curated list of the best tweets in the entire world.

Cause that’s what Buzzfeed does for a living. And so I actually can just take a tweet and then retweet it. And my, my feed is always going to be kind of active. So I do retweet some funny stuff just cause I have access to it. But I think where I’m the most organic and the most engaged is Instagram, which is just my name, Liza Palmer

Crystal: All right, and we’ll put the links in the show notes as well. So for anybody who wants to find those things easily, we’ll make you a shortcut cheat sheet applies that. Thank you so much for taking time out, your busy, glamorous, and exciting life to talk with us!

Liza Palmer: Well, umm…okay hahahah

Crystal: And share your knowledge that, yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there and I am looking forward to hearing how people go off and apply all of those things.

Liza Palmer: A happier existence. Yeah, absolutely. Cause then that’s better writing. Yeah.

Crystal: And the world needs more good stories.

Liza Palmer: It’s true. Yeah.

Post interview discussion 

Michele: So we have listened to the amazing, amazing, amazing interview, with Liza. There was so much value that I want to show you something. If you’re not seeing us, maybe you’re not on YouTube, but I’m showing it to the camera. The amount of notes and the underlining that I did. There is really a lot of value on what Liza just shared. I think like, in the interview, Crystal shared some of the most important takeaways.

But she did that on her side of things. On a different approach of things. And that is super valuable. But I also want to give you my 5 cents. About my experience with social media and why the relationship between social media and the people that are using it- be it an entrepreneur an author an authorpreneur- is changing.

Now there is one thing that Liza said about the social media and she, I actually thought it was a very interesting, very powerful example. Something that a person said as the social media conferences, which she attended. And I think what I’m about to say that she said, will summarize everything that there is to understand.

The universe of meaning about social media now in 2020 which is basically more on the pitfall of social media rather than what you can gain with social media. And I think like it’s an interesting perspective because you basically are underlining something that is negative of the social media.

So trying to boil the ocean. So all of it, this is the sense people are trying to boil the ocean when we’re talking about social media. And I’ve never really thought about it in these terms. But if you think about it, you are seeing maybe a person that use every single social media on the spectrum and the social media number increases as we are talking.

TikTok was one of the new kids in the block, we can say, but again, it’s just one of the results of technology, right? We have more access to technology, or we have different things we can see. We can experience a different social media or gonna sprout the medium video or the medium podcast, or the medium, or can be writing things. There are so there are so many opportunities.

What she says, it’s completely like a voting of things. She says you can try to boil your ocean, but it’s going to be impossible to do. What you can do instead is just take a bucket. I analyzed that social media might be Instagram or might be YouTube, and try to boil that.

So you take one bucket at the time, you try that social media and you see if the audience is for example, interested and or engaged to your books or your figure as an author, if they connect with you. And you can’t possibly do that if you don’t try different things. You get data from the experience and experiment you get from that boiling of the- not of the ocean, but boiling up that small quantity of water.

You try to get the lesson. Are people interacting with you? And interacting is different from what simple life hacking. That’s another thing that Liza says that I think is very powerful. A person that likes your post on Instagram is not as much important as a person that is commenting or even sharing it.

The second and the third is an act of will that a person is doing it to show you, “I get you”. “I understand why you did that”. That was so powerful to me because it really boils down, and I’m using this a sentence a lot, but it’s really the important thing. It really boils down specifically what it is important for her nowadays.

You have to be specific. You have to be committed and you have to understand what is it, the people that are interested to you. They’re not everywhere or anywhere. They’re just in selected places. Your job is to understand where are they, why they’re following you, and that’s why you can be, discovered in several different ways.

You can ask questions. For example, if you have a newsletter, I ask them how they found you. Like that’s something super basic, but it’s something that I realizing just in the last few weeks, you can interact with the people that find you. You can try to understand via social media. Via newsletter.

Why these people came to you in the first place. And I think if you can replicate that. And you can find maybe an avatar of the people that loves you so much. You can find another person similar to the first one, and then to the third one. And then you can do what they call in the business, that you can transform a stranger from a stranger to a super fan.

Which is another thing that will bear a completely different kind of a theme. But this is super important. So you have to have a bucket of water. You take the water out of the ocean, you test it, you see what works, you see what doesn’t

Crystal: You also want to make sure that you’ve got a bit of a creative edge, right? You don’t want it to be posting exactly the same thing that everybody else is posting, and you should be able to bring in your own unique bits and pieces. We talked in some of our initial episodes about what was our polymath triangle. What were the three things about each of us that makes us, us?

Then I think in social media, if you are not bringing those things to the table in your own way, you’re wasting an opportunity. And you’re probably also going to get bored because to be honest- I was looking at, okay, what takeaways am I gonna take from Liza’s interview and what are some things I want to re-examine in my own author business and my own social media channels and make changes after having that conversation.

And so I went back and I was scrolling through my feeds and I was like, yeah, you know what? Actually, like, as much as I like my Instagram feed, and I have lots of great author friends. You know, and I have lots of other people in there too, but I want to do even more. So I am going to, in fact, maybe in the comments, if any of you have amazing Instagram accounts that you follow, that are really interesting from different things, if they’re authors, great, but if they’re from other areas of life, I would love to have some of your recommendations of who we should be following.

So please drop those in the comments astrategicotherpreneur.com or in the comments section under wherever you’re listening to podcasts is fine too. But we would really like to hear your, your suggestions broaden us, educate us, help us be better people and more interesting social mediaers. That would be great.

How about you? What are you going to take away and apply after listening to that? What practical actions will you take?

Michele: There was one thing that Liza said. Kind of a conclusion of the speech that I thought was very powerful. And it’s simple at the same time. She talked a lot about the authenticity and how that component is King.

Especially if you are a storyteller. Like we are authors, right? Doesn’t matter if you are writing a certain genre. There are things that apply to everybody. I believe that can be science fiction, can be fiction, can be nonfiction. It can be anything. There is a way you can go about and follow trends. I think she called it like trend chasing or something like that.

And you will see that thing like in the trend, for example, if they’re on Facebook when maybe an author is trying to chase a trend every single time, there will be something a bit different that doesn’t speak necessarily of what the author thinks. It just says something more broad about the need of media attention.

But what she said was like following the line all yourself, follow the line of yourself. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but it’s like a line. It’s not a segment. It’s like something that continues from one point to the other and it’s basically you. You can call it your brand, or you can call it yourself or you can call it your message, you can call it your voice.

But I think being consistent with that is even less difficult that trying to be something different or something that is not you. Because you’re trying to do something that is not you. You have to come up with something smart at the moment. So it’s like an exercise of killing brain cells, but if it’s just you, you know, there are people that maybe don’t like you.

At the same time, you will foster trust and I think this authenticity bit is probably one of the most important and powerful things that Liza says. And in this day and age, I think authenticity is an asset, and it’s increasingly more difficult to be ourselves.

We’re talking about social media. It might be a reason why we’re not exactly who we are because we see other people that are maybe different or more fortunate in the other ways. But I do believe what she says on the authenticity side and not trend chasing might be the most important thing she said. Out of the whole interview.

And probably one of the things I’ll focus on more is to try and analyze what I’m doing. If I’m being authentic with the people that follow me. And I will try to also see other authors who are doing work. How do they behave? Because I really think of what Liza is trying to say with that sentence was like, being yourself is an asset. It’s not necessarily easy to do. That shouldn’t be a reason why you don’t try. So this is basically my biggest take away. I’m curious to know what is yours after having the luck and the lovely things to speaking with her in a real time.

Crystal: Yeah. I am lucky also. I do think the biggest thing is- you really highlighted that, that don’t boil the ocean. So narrow it down. So for me deciding which platforms am I just going to  give permission to go away because I’ve been sort of half passing some of the social media stuff because I don’t really want to be on the platform, but you should, as an author, you know, if you’re going to run Facebook ads, you need to be on Facebook and you need a Facebook group and all of these things, I really don’t want to.

So I am giving myself permission to choose not to do the things that do not feel like the good fit for me. So that, I think is a huge takeaway. And the authenticity piece of course, is always a cornerstone to whatever I’m doing because it takes too much energy to be anybody other than yourself.

If we’re being perfectly honest, I don’t want to have to edit or think about who I’m supposed to be. I just want to be, and that is so much easier. And on that note of authenticity, guess what awaits us.

What is one important thing you learned about yourself this past year?

Michele: Oh!

Crystal: The curious jar! It’s time for an appearance.

Michele: I don’t know why. Every single time I forget. They don’t feel, it’s like, I know we’re done. It’s not! We’re not done!

Crystal: Okay, so we have the jar. It is a curious jar. It is filled with questions on little rainbow papers. I am going to shuffle it up. You tell me when to stop.

Michele: Five, four, three, two, now!

Crystal: Green one today. All right. Are lights and weird in here? Yeah, it’s green. Okay. What is one important thing you learned about yourself this past year? You can’t read my handwriting. Don’t even worry about it.

Michele: Of course I can! *whispers* I’m trying to be nice!

Of course I can!

Okay, well, I actually have the answers to this question. And I want to tell you like straight away: you got to ask for help. And I’m going to elaborate on this. I would say before a few months ago. I was a person that thought I had something figured out then want to just continue from that direction.

But at the same time, there was another part of me saying “you don’t know what you’re doing”. And so I was like, huh. I was lucky enough to, I attended several different events in person. The great fortune to meet a lot of authors at different stages of their career. And every single one of them taught me a lesson without me asking anything, just because it was closer to them, they taught me stuff.

Maybe because I was snatching the conversation in one of the corridors, you know, Crystal, when you do that kind of stuff and the festivals. Or a conference or any way you can possibly find other authors and readers. Sometimes it was like, just listen to them giving a workshop.

So I attended several, I would say a dozen of these different things in the last year. And spoiler alert, I actually met Crystal in one of these events. And when I spoke to her. And when I spoke with other people, other authors, other writers, readers even, there was this voice.

It was saying to me, there is so much more that you know now and you could get whatever you want. If you’re just a humble yourself and just admit you don’t know what you’re doing. You need help. You need to ask for coaching, mentoring, whatever you want to call it. I mean, one of the biggest lesson, I wouldn’t say just of the last year I will say, Oh, the last five, maybe 10 years probably. It’s one of those things that maybe you read in books. Then like you need to seek the advice of people that already figured out how to build the wheel. I don’t know if you exactly say it like that.

Crystal: You don’t need to reinvent the wheel

Michele: Exactly. I think that that was the most powerful thing. We only say that I had to the past year. And it’s one of the things that hopefully I will never forget again. And now that I exposed myself and I feel like super, completely naked. I want you to get figuratively naked and tell us-

Crystal: Cause we’re a PG rated show

Michele: No, not a chance. So what is it that you learned?

Crystal: I had a big year. I learned a lot in this last year. We had a series of unfortunate events, we’ll say. It was, we had some real ups and some real highs, but we also had some really interesting shakeups and almost exactly a year ago, actually, our home got destroyed in a flood. Was a sort of unexpected city water main burst. And we ended up living in temporary housing for most of the year, and they rebuilt our apartment and we lost most of our stuff. So we got to sort of start fresh and decide what were we going to rebuy, what were we not?

So I learned a lot about myself and what is acting actually important now. And you know, when we were standing at the edge of our apartment and the folks said, okay, you’ve got a few hours you need to get anything you think you’re going to want for the next year, you need to be, pack it up right now and take it with you.

That was a very interesting exercise. And, you know, when we got back to the hotel and we each dumped out our bag of what we had rescued, my husband and I had a good laugh about the things we had chosen, but, you know, I had my laptop. I had two of my craft writing books off the shelf and I had my magic quilt my mom made me for writing and that that was about it. Like a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts, and you know, we were able to salvage a few more things the next day to take with us as well. But it was just a very interesting look at my own self and what I value in what I need to function. So that was really interesting.

And I have now been able to apply that. Right before that flood, I actually got a fortune cookie that said, “you have everything you need”. And that fortune cookie was pinned to a cork board on my wall. And that fortune actually survived the flood. So it is now pinned to my current cork board, which says, you have everything and you need, which is good.

The other one I got said, you are about to find out what really matters to you. If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed.

Michele: The universe was talking to you!

Crystal: Exactly. Really what I learned was that everything around you is just physical surroundings and that you need to be able to kind of go inward for what is your home, you know, what and what feels like home.

How do you write through some of that stuff? And you know, that varies. There were good days. There were not good days, but definitely just responding to not the perfect conditions and not waiting for the perfect conditions, because otherwise life can just pass you right by. So I’d say, yeah, that was what I learned, give myself the space and permission to shake things up a little bit. And two, really see the opportunity in each thing that happens. Things do not always go as we would like. And there is always an opportunity buried in the things that make us most uncomfortable in the moment.

So yup. There you go.

Michele: Somebody’s going to tweet that. That was good!

Crystal: Yeah. Thanks. This is why I keep you around. You’re really good for my self-esteem. All right, so, if you can see the questions, they’re running a little low in here, folks. We are, you know, down in the bottom third, so we could use some more questions. If you have something you would like us to answer and crack ourselves open all honestly and vulnerably in front of the world. Then you are welcome to email those questions too. ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will add it to the mix. We also want to get to know all of you, so we would love for you to leave us a comment in the show notes for this episode and answer the curious jar question for yourself

So in case you’ve forgotten already, the question is, what is one important thing you learned about yourself this past year?

Michele: For show notes, links to resources we mentioned and coupons, discounts on tools we love, visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com. Subscribe to the newsletter and each week we will mail you just one thing that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey, and a link to our latest episode.

Crystal: And you’ll get a gold star and a billion thousand, I believe was the number from earlier, bonus points in the game of life if you leave a review for us, wherever you listen to this podcast. We are a shiny new podcast, so we need help. If you don’t leave us reviews, nobody will know to find us. So please and thank you. Do that.