One game our new dog seems to enjoy is play­ing “Find.” Of course, what­ever she’s sent to find needs to have some kind of food asso­ci­ated with it, but she’s pretty good at find­ing rawhide chews or Kongs filled with peanut but­ter. As writ­ers, what do we have to do to get peo­ple to find us? Rub­bing our­selves with peanut but­ter prob­a­bly isn’t the answer.

I’m an opin­ion­ated, stuck-in-her ways old lady, and my nor­mal response to things is to wait—usually until I’m the last one to join in, and that par­tic­u­lar “thing” fades away (or goes out of busi­ness) as soon as I join. But, I’m not com­pletely adverse to try­ing new things. I bought a NOOK Color on pre-order, after all. And my new com­puter is so “new” that there were hardly any cus­tomer reviews.

Two words that pre­dom­i­nated the NINC con­fer­ence were reach and dis­cov­er­abil­ity. “How to sell more books” was rarely the topic. As a mat­ter of fact, they warned against using a book cover as a pro­file pic­ture. What’s the dif­fer­ence? Peo­ple don’t want to be slapped upside the head with “buy my book” pro­mo­tions. They’re prob­a­bly more will­ing to get to know you.

I know, espe­cially after see­ing what lim­it­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion did to my book sales with some of my ear­lier pub­lish­ers, that for me, it’s a sim­ple mat­ter of, “If you’re not there, they can’t find you.” But this “they” should be dis­cov­er­ing you, not nec­es­sar­ily your books. And how can they dis­cover you? If you’re not a well-known author with phys­i­cal books in places peo­ple shop, it’s hard to get noticed. Right now, the answer seems to be: Social Media.

As writ­ers, we have to learn to step back from try­ing to con­nect tweets, ads, or Face­book posts with sales. Instead, we have to strive to get peo­ple to know us. With the Inter­net at our fin­ger­tips, we have the poten­tial to reach tremen­dous audi­ences. But what’s the best way to do it?

My first pub­lisher required sug­gested a blog and a web­site. With one short story to my credit, it seemed a bit of overkill, but I went ahead and started blog­ging. I found I enjoyed it. (I hope you do, too.)

Next up was MySpace. Tried it, didn’t like it, and left. Face­book? I knew noth­ing of its ori­gins, but it seemed so “high school” with ‘friend­ing’ peo­ple. (Later, I found out it began as a col­lege enter­prise, so I wasn’t that far off—and con­sid­er­ing my age at the time, there was lit­tle dif­fer­ence between high school and col­lege “kids.”) But I joined. And, as some of you know, even accu­mu­lated enough ‘friends’ that I had to start an author page. Now instead of look­ing for friends, I’m look­ing for peo­ple to ‘like’ me—still sounds kind of high school, but that’s the way the game is played.

Twit­ter? What’s that? A bunch of peo­ple shar­ing what they had for break­fast? No thanks. And yet, here I am on Twit­ter, although I don’t think I’ve shared my break­fast menu yet. I’ve got a cou­ple thou­sand fol­low­ers there, and some­times it’s a fun place to be–like the office water cooler.

And now, due in part to dis­cus­sions at NINC, and in part to my guest blog­ger, Larissa Rein­hart, who explained it from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive in her post, I’ve got a Pin­ter­est account. I played around with it, and we’ll see what that does to my reach. And if any­one here wants to tell me how to use it, I’m will­ing to learn. For now, I’ve stum­bled through by trial and error and cre­ated a few boards, being care­ful to post only those images I have per­mis­sion to use—which means most of them are mine! I’m curi­ous to see how this might extend my reach. But, I’m there, so if some­one finds me, then it’s prob­a­bly a good thing.

One impor­tant les­son I’ve learned, is “Never say never.”