Wednesday, March 5, 2014

New Marketing Tool

Flaws and Foibles of Pinterest

I've been on Pinterest for quite some time. I remember when I first heard about the new social networking site, it was still in beta phase. In fact, I had to do a lot of fancy footwork to get an invite to participate (the site was still invite-only). This was before anyone had determined that mostly women used the site, and before it had become a user-made glossy magazine extolling the virtues of traditional ideals of femininity. Seriously. Shit could make you crazy.

But I was first drawn to Pinterest because of the nature of my imagination. When I am imagining a character, setting, and especially a plot point, I am very visual about it. I have often, pre-Pinterest, wished that I could draw. But I am shitty at drawing. I have also thought about clipping pictures out of magazines that come close to my imaginings, but that doesn't often work and if it did it would eat up too much time.

So the idea of an online visual bulletin board did appeal to me. And I keep on hearing, even now when much of Pinterest has devolved into a patrolling the border of presented femininity and making sure everyone is in line, that many authors use it for compiling and presenting research, visualizing character and setting, and book promotion. I'm just not sure how they are using Pinterest effectively.

The Love Affair is Over?

But this past week I've had an idea about how to use Pinterest. Oh, sure, I do have a RoboNomics Board. But that's just a big mishmash of random ideas and research that I've compiled that has no rhyme or reason. I decided to start a board that starts with my picking out the instances of tech and robots that I've written about in RoboNomics the novel and matching them up with some of the real-life cutting edge tech that directly or indirectly inspired the fictional tech. And so I give you my new Pinterest board:

Follow Stephanie Wilson's board Tech Featured in RoboNomics on Pinterest.

It's still in the nascent stages, as you see. But I think this will help me a lot in terms of book promotion. I think I am going to go something similar for my other book on Wattpad, The Tales of Omorbia. I already have a lot of visual material for that. See:

Follow Stephanie Wilson's board On the Back Burner on Pinterest.

I plan to expand and separate that material so that I have a single board for each parallel storyline or character. We'll see how the chips fall.

So, what do you think? Do you think Pinterest is over? Or are you, like me, ready to rekindle your love affair with it?

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