Karen Sandler

Tag: facebook

  • Beware the Facebook Ads

    FB Author Page ScreenshotLike a lot of people, I use Facebook to stay in touch with family and friends. I also use it to promote myself as an author, although I’ve found it to be pretty ineffective in that respect (as I posted here).

    But while it’s fun to catch up with the family and some of the posts are very entertaining, Facebook can be a dangerous place too. Dangerous, that is, in terms of sending you off to websites that might add a little something extra to your computer that you’d just as soon not have.

    FB Ads ScreenshotYou’ve probably noticed the “Sponsored” content over on the right hand side of your Facebook page. Lots of ads there, some of them quite enticing. They change frequently. To the right is a screenshot I took of ads that appeared on my page recently.

    You might have to click on that image and enlarge it to read the text. It’s perfectly safe to click since it’s just a jpeg image.

    But the original ads would not have been safe to click. Although each one has a link displayed as part of the ad (enchantmen.com, lyft.com, weightwatchers.com, zulily.com), the true link for each ad is entirely different. Clicking that ad will send you not to Weight Watchers or Zulily, but to a site with malware.

    As a user of Facebook, this is distressing, both with regards to the damage these sites could do to my computer, but also because of the fraud aspect. Facebook is taking money from companies that represent themselves dishonestly.

    As an author who has used Facebook to promote, this is unsettling because I don’t want ads for my books to appear alongside scams. How would a reader know whether a click on my book cover would take them to Amazon where they can buy my ebook, or if they’ll end up on a site that downloads some kind of malware onto their computer?

    Facebook does have a form I can fill out to report these fraudulent ads. But honestly, I’d be submitting forms all day long because based my observations, few of the ads in the sponsored section are genuine. Maybe my Facebook page is a scam magnet, and no other users out there are having the same experience as me. But it seems to me that Facebook is not performing due diligence in allowing those ads to run in the first place. And I’d say it’s their responsibility to fix the problem and not mine.

    Here are some guaranteed genuine links for my latest books. Just click on the cover to buy.

    Full Cover-s Tankborn sml Awakening Final cover-s

  • Social Media for the Genre-Conflicted, Part 2

    KarenSandler_TillTheStarsFade_200pxIn Social Media for the Genre-Conflicted, Part 1, I talked about how I created social media identities for all three of the genres in which I am published–romance, young adult science fiction, and mystery. In part 2, I’ll talk about how I juggle these multiple personalities.

    I’m not yet entirely satisfied with how well I’m managing the task of promoting myself in these disparate genres. In some cases, I’m learning as I go, discovering what works, and stumbling over the pitfalls of what doesn’t. But it’s been a relief to accept the reality that my work doesn’t fit neatly into one pigeonhole. And while I can’t really say that I have something for every reader amongst my 20+ books, there’s certainly plenty of variety.

    Awakening Final cover-s So how do I wrangle the three-headed hydra of my author identity? By promoting myself in a united fashion where I can and splitting my personalities where necessary.

    This blog is one area where I let all three genres come out and play, sometimes together (in more generic posts) and sometimes separately (such as in this one). I do my best to put up a new post at least once a week. If you look through my previous posts, you’ll find that the majority of them are writing-related, along the lines of tips and tricks of the trade. There’s some personal stuff woven in there as well, such as this remembrance of my dad and this post about a childhood memory. I also will do a hybrid like this post, interweaving the personal and the writing craft together.

    Besides this blog, I utilize numerous social media platforms–Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Triberr, Google+, and Linked in. Most of my efforts are focused on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, despite its shortcomings, does have one bit of functionality that makes it very easy to manage multiple identities–Pages. By logging into my profile, Karen Sandler, I can access all of the four pages that I administrate. There’s a handy little wheel in the upper right-hand corner that allows me to switch from my profile to my author page, the Tankborn page, the mystery page, and the OnFireFiction page. I don’t have to log out of Facebook to post as those alternate identities.

    Full CoverTwitter, on the other hand, requires a separate login for each identity. It would be pretty crazy-making if I was logging in and logging out of the various Twitter accounts I use. Instead, I’ve installed several browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Opera), and login to a different identity on each browser.

    For me, that means I’m logged in as @karensandlerYA on Firefox (my favorite browser), @karensandler on Chrome, @OnFireFiction on IE, and @tankborn on Opera. I can hop back and forth from one to the other, retweet posts that I think the followers of multiple feeds would find interesting, and keep track of who I’m following and who’s following me.

    Why not use a tool like Hootsuite? I do use Hootsuite, but I haven’t figured out a way to tweet as a different identity than the one I’m logged into. In other words, if I’m logged in as @karensandlerYA on Firefox, even if I select the @karensandler tab, my tweets will be identified as having come from @karensandlerYA. If there’s someone out there who knows differently, please tell me in the comments!

    As for the other social media sites, Google+, Pinterest, Triberr, and Linked in, I’ve so far had less of a presence there. Triberr automatically feeds through all my blog posts (a fantastic tool for reaching new followers). I will post the link to my blog posts on Google+ manually. I haven’t discovered an automated way to accomplish that. I feel a little freer to post what might be considered controversial opinions on Google+, while I mostly keep politics out of Twitter and Facebook.

    I think Pinterest is extremely cool, but I just don’t get on the site much (browsing the wonderful images there is a real time suck). And I don’t think Linked in is as useful to authors as it might be for more business-related professions.

    The question I’m continually asking myself as I post and tweet and blog–what works? My goal is to sell more books. To do that, readers have to discover me. So, do regular blog posts, status updates on Facebook and Google+, tweets on Twitter, and Pinterest pins accomplish that? I confess I haven’t yet got all the answers.

    Where are you finding success? What do you think produces results? I’d love to hear about your experience.

  • When Fiction Becomes Future…or Present

    KarenSandler_TillTheStarsFade_200pxScience fiction is a funny genre. There are those (like me) who devour it, who sometimes feel there’s something missing in a book that doesn’t include at least a little imagined science. Then there are those who just don’t get the genre, are completely alienated by it. To them, it’s weird and unreal.

    Yet in the best science fiction, there’s nothing more real. It looks ahead to what might be and extrapolates not just the science, but how people adapt to the science. It can show how one change, small or large, completely transforms a people, a society.

    The Green Movement in Iran and the more recent Arab Spring got me thinking about a Larry Niven story I read thirty or so years ago. “Flash Crowd” showed the impact of the transfer booth, an instantaneous, essentially free form of travel. You step into a transfer booth down on the corner near your house (like a way cooler bus stop) and in the next moment you’re downtown, or at the university or at the local mall.

    What happens in the story is that folks start hearing about something interesting going on at Santa Monica mall (a stretch of several pedestrian-only open air blocks in Santa Monica, CA) and all those people jump into transfer booths. This near immediate influx of people on the mall leads to a riot, something that never could have happened if folks had to climb into their cars, negotiate Los Angeles freeway traffic, find a place to park, etc. Easy availability of transfer booths = riot.

    Transfer booths haven’t been invented yet, but think about their virtual equivalent. The Internet. Facebook. Twitter. Texting. The demonstrators during the Arab Spring used those near instantaneous forms of communication to organize, to plan, to keep their compatriots and sympathizers and the outside world updated as to conditions on the ground. The protesters couldn’t instantaneously appear in the streets of Cairo or Damascus, but the Internet and cell phones have facilitated their movements.

    What Larry Niven predicted when he published “Flash Crowd” in 1973 didn’t come literally true. We still haven’t figured out how to instantaneously transport matter from point A to point B. But that phenomenon of informing the world in an instant has come to pass and in the case of the Arab Spring (despite the current state of affairs in Syria), I think that can be a good thing.

    Have you read a book or a short story that has projected a possible future? Have you seen that projected future become now? Leave a comment. Include the title and author if you have it.