Threads
Social media is a strange thing. Most of the time my posts gain little traction and that’s fine. I deliberately pulled away so I wasn’t having to keep coming up with new content. I tend to recycle my book posts and will do the occasional other photograph. So, in keeping with this I posted a photograph on Threads which I took early one morning in Edinburgh as I was walking to work. It was of the castle, completely hidden by the haar which had come down. That’s a cold fog or mist. I made the point that in Scotland we have haar and here’s the castle shrouded in it. Three hundred and five likes and 5.8k views. A big step up from scraping into double figures for likes and if I’m lucky a hundred views. At the time of writing I have 219 followers on Threads and only gained a couple as a result of the posts. I posted the same post on X, and it got two likes and 63 views. I have 10,105 followers on X. I have a free account, unverified. Note that my Threads account is also unverified.
A week later I posted a photograph of a film set being constructed outside St Giles’ Cathedral in the Royal Mile as I was heading to the station and asked if anyone knew what was happening. Two hundred and sixteen likes and a 100k views. I posted the same image on X, and it received nine likes and 851 views. As I say, social media is a strange thing. My posts are now back to sensible numbers again. If interested, the film set was for Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Frankenstein, based on the novel by Mary Shelley written in 1818. The image I posted is the one that accompanies this blog post.
As an aside, I spent no time at all on the photographs. They were snapped on the move and there was no post processing with filters. I didn’t post these on Instagram, mainly because I don’t post much there. It would be nice to have the same level of engagement for a book post, but even if it happens, there is no guarantee of sales off the back of it. As writers we can choose to spend huge amounts of time on social media for little profit, or use those hours to write more books. Given the random nature of social media, I much prefer spending my time grappling with the page than the algorithms. Writing is the thing that is within our control. I think we sometimes forget that the writers we admire the most from the past, didn’t have the distraction of social media. Same for artists and musicians. They got on with the job. As with everything else, there is a balance to be struck and decisions to be made on how you use your time and how it makes you feel. I much prefer blogging to posting on other platforms. It suits me more and allows me to expand on ideas and work through my thoughts. It also gives me the chance to write random stuff about random places and hopefully shows that writing isn’t all about sitting at a laptop all day, but does involve getting out and experiencing things, while making notes and filing them away for use in future writing projects.
The Fiction Factory 