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Writers Don’t Get to Collaborate Like Musicians

I envy musicians. Not just because they play music and entertain millions of people. Not just because they can spend hours and hours doing something they love, breaking silence with something that’s beautiful or joyful. Not because they can create magic with their instruments. (OK, yes, that. I learned bass guitar for a year during the pandemic, but haven’t touched it for several months.)

I envy them for their collaboration and support. I am jealous of the way that just a few talented musicians can get together, play for a couple hours, and make something that no one has ever heard. I’m jealous of the way they can swap out people and make something even differenter than the thing they did before. (Yes, I know that’s not a word. That’s something I can do that musicians can’t.)

This week, I listened to Justin Richmond interview Johnny Mathis on the Broken Record podcast. My mom loved Johnny Mathis, and we listened to his Christmas albums every year when I was a kid, so I didn’t want to miss this one.

In the interview, Johnny — Mr. Mathis — talked about how when he first went to New York, he visited jazz clubs to watch musician friends perform and that they would often ask him to go up on stage and sing with them. Or how he worked with other musician friends on different projects, singing on their records, or inviting them to sing on his.

Mathis was able to perform with whomever and wherever he had the opportunity. And he was able to choose who he wanted to work with, and the result was something unique and beautiful and was enjoyed by people all around the world, like my mom. It was this collaboration and cooperation that made him one of the most popular singers and artists of the 20th century.

Raspberry Pie (That’s my son on the right).
A little closer to home, I watch my son play bass guitar in a few different bands around Central Florida. He gets asked to play fairly frequently because there’s a shortage of good bass players, and because they know he’ll do a good job for them.

At some of his performances, the band leader will sometimes ask a musician friend to join them on stage for a song or two. Or he’ll participate in an improv jazz session with some friends, and the performance will be so seamless, it’s as if they had practiced together for hours and hours.

I envy musicians for their collaboration and ability to just slip into someone else’s ensemble. As long as they know what they’re doing, it’s seamless, and you wouldn’t know they hadn’t always been there.

Music is all about relationships. Not just the notes between rhythm and melody, but in finding people you can mesh with and trust. As long as they’ve got the skills and you can depend on them, you can make some excellent music together. You can even record that and share it with the entire world, or play it in front of a live audience of one person or 50,000 people all at once.

Writers don’t get to collaborate

Writers don’t get to collaborate, not in that way. Writing is a solitary event. You do it alone, and no one is there to help. It’s hours and hours of writing and editing, but no one is looking over your shoulder to give advice. No one is typing on one half of the keyboard while you type on the other. No one is laying down a funky verb line while you dance around a noun melody with a staccato punctuation drum beat keeping the rhythm.

Right now, I’m sitting in a local coffee shop writing this, and no one is helping me. They’re off in their own little solo performances, tapping away at a laptop, looking at their phone, or reading a book. One guy next to me is writing in a small notebook. (God bless the pen-and-notebook people.)

Oh, sure, you can have editors or fellow writers pore over your work and make it better. But they pore over it alone, give it back to you, and then you go off by yourself and fix it. Then you can share it with the world, where it’s read by one person or 50,000 people all at once.

But you don’t receive real-time feedback as people read your book. You’ll never experience a room full of people all reading your book at the same time, cheering at the good parts or applauding at the end of each chapter.

Working together isn’t really collaboration. Not like musicians do.

There are three ways writers can work together on a project, but I wouldn’t call it true collaboration.

  • Split the project in half and work on it. Like, dividing up chapters of a book and writing them individually — like Kyle Lacy and I or Jason Falls and I did on our books. You may be working together, but it’s not an ensemble, it’s a group of individuals all working at different times.
  • Share a Google Doc and write in the same document at the same time. Jason and I did that in the first chapter of No Bullshit Social Media. We decided we hated it and never did it again. I would hate to try to do this with several writers at once.
  • Sit in a room full of other writers and shout out ideas while one person writes them all down. This is how writers rooms work, especially for comedies, and I would dearly love to be in one of those for a day. This is the closest to real collaboration, but even then, each line comes from a single person and is improved on by other individuals. Sure, they piggyback off each other, but they’re not making music.

But those opportunities are rare. Or, in the case of the Google Docs thing, terrible.

So writers are left to their own devices and can’t collaborate to make beautiful work in the same way musicians do. And for that, I envy them.

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Book Authors, Your Publisher Will Not Handle Your Book Publicity for You. Only You Will.

A few days ago, I spoke with two different people who were ready to publish their very first book. They wanted to know how to find a publisher that would handle their book publicity for them.

“Oh, your publisher won’t promote your book for you,” I said.

“Really? I thought the publisher handled all of that!”

“No, not at all. Unless your last name is Grisham or Patterson, your publisher won’t do shit for you.*”

* (Technically, that’s not true. Your publisher handles all editing, page layout, and cover design. You pay for that if you self-publish.)

It’s inescapable: When you write a book, you need to do your own promotion, or you need to hire someone to do it for you. Your publisher won’t do it, your agent won’t do it, your friends won’t do it. (Hell, they’ll barely buy your book!)

And people will not flock to your book just because you wrote it.

Your book may be great, but no one will care.

That’s because there are close to 1 million books published in the US each year. And if you count self-published books, that number is closer to 4 million.

Also, if you do manage to find a publisher, there’s only a 1% chance that your book will reach a bookstore.

Out of the 1 million books published this year, only 10,000 will make it to a bookstore. (My last edition of Branding Yourself was not placed in Barnes & Noble, even though they carried the last two editions plus my other book, No Bullshit Social Media. My publisher said Barnes & Noble just wasn’t a viable partner for them anymore. One of the biggest biz-tech publishers in the country, and they no longer worked with Barnes & Noble.)

So, your book is not going to magically sell just because you wrote it. If it did, we’d all be rich.

Which means you need promotion and publicity.

But your publisher is publishing dozens, if not a few hundred, books per year. Do you think they have the time to devote to your book and ignore all the others?

Absolutely not. If your publisher can put any weight behind the promotional efforts, it will be a few hours of sending a generic press release to all the same media outlets, blogs, and podcasters they send all other book announcements to. And then it’s on to the next book. And the next one. And the next one. And soon, your book is forgotten along with all the others they just promoted.

In fact, when you submit your book proposal or manuscript to a publisher, they’ll want to know the size of your social media footprint and newsletter subscription list. And if it’s not “a lot,” then they won’t publish you. It doesn’t matter if your book is the second coming of Confederacy of Dunces, they will give you a hard pass.

Which means you’re on your own.

Which means — and I cannot stress this enough — you need to do your own book publicity.

Let me say that again but in a bigger font.

You need to do your own book publicity!

If you don’t do it yourself, your book will not get promoted.

Oh sure, you could pay someone to do it, but you won’t get good publicity for less than a few thousand dollars per month.

It’s a question of time versus money: If you don’t have the time, then you need to pay someone to do it. If you don’t have the money, then you need to do it yourself.

Without explaining how to do it all (because there are several good books on the subject (affiliate link)), your publicity efforts should include:

  • An email newsletter campaign.
  • A social media campaign (Twitter and/or Facebook, plus maybe TikTok).
  • A book reviewer/blogger campaign.
  • A podcast interview campaign.
  • A paid online advertising campaign.
  • An email-your-friends campaign. (Email each of them, one at a time, ask them to buy.)
  • A convention/conference campaign.

You don’t have to do all of these things, but you need at least two of them — the first two — because they’re the easiest, they can be automated and scheduled, and they’re free. (Sign up for Mailchimp or Moosend; they have free starter options.)

I don’t care if you hate social media. I don’t care if you don’t know how to do an email newsletter. I don’t care if you hate having to email 200 book bloggers one at a time.

You have to do it. You have to do it. You have to do it.

Because your book won’t sell otherwise. Period, end of sentence.

Otherwise, your book will be the greatest thing you’ve ever done that no one will ever know it. You’ll sell it to a few friends and family members, and your partner will secretly buy three copies and give them to friends. But it will be just a tiny drop in 4-Million-Books-Published-Each-Year Ocean.

So let me say it again, but in red: You need to do your own book publicity!

“But I don’t like social—”

I don’t care. Get over yourself.

“But I don’t know how—”

I don’t care. Figure it out.

“But I don’t have the ti—”

I don’t care. Make the time.

“But I—”

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

I don’t care. Do you know who else doesn’t care?

Everyone!

You need to do book publicity to make them care. You need to promote your book until you’re sick of it. And then you need to promote it some more. And when you think everyone else is sick of it, promote it some more.

Bottom line: You’re going to spend 90% of your time writing your book. And you’re going to spend the other 90% promoting it.

Because if you don’t do it, no one else will. No one will care as much as you. No one is invested as much as you.

You can either pay someone to do it, and they won’t spend as much time on it as you want.

Or you can suck it up and do it yourself.

Because your publisher will not promote your book for you.

Final note

All of this is not to discourage you into giving up or not seeking publication. You absolutely should. Submit to agents and publishers and get your book out into the world. You deserve to be published! People should read your work. Just be aware that your work is not done once you write The End. It’s only beginning.

Photo credit: Dimhou (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Questions About Personal Branding for the Writing Workshop of Chicago

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Writing Workshop of Chicago about personal branding secrets for authors. We had a great question-and-answer period at the end, but we ran out of time before we ran out of questions.

So the organizer and fellow humor writer, Brian Klems, forwarded the questions to me and I decided to answer them in a blog post. This way, he can refer all the attendees to this page and there’s a permanent location for the questions. But more importantly, I’ll get a bump in web traffic.

First, Yvonne asked, “Are Facebook author pages useful?”

Yes, they are, for a couple of reasons. One, a lot of your readers are on Facebook and it’s easy to point them to that page. Second, it gives you more privacy because you don’t have to be Facebook friends with your readers. You don’t necessarily want them to see your personal stuff, so an author’s page is a great way to do that.

However, keep in mind that Facebook limits the reach of its pages in the hopes that you’ll pay to boost your different posts. Depending on what you write, you might be better off creating a group about your books or topic. Groups updates are not throttled the way a page’s updates are, plus you can encourage more discussion among your readers.

But don’t let the Facebook page/group be your main hub of activity. Try to have a writer’s blog/website as your central hub and treat Facebook and other networks as the spokes.

Maria asked, “I’d always heard you should not post the same things on your various social media channels, so you give people an incentive to follow you in different areas. Your thoughts?”

That’s mostly true. One thing to keep in mind is that people will not see all your social messages. That is, my readers don’t see what I post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at the same time. People have their preferred social networks and probably won’t go to the others just to find you.

Having said that, you can take advantage of each network’s format to post your best message. You get 280 characters on Twitter, but you get 2,200 on Instagram. You may want to cram several #hashtags into a tweet, but stick them in the first comment on Instagram.

If you want to do simple things like sharing Instagram photos to Twitter and Facebook, you can automate that with Zapier or If This Then That. You can set it up so when you post a photo to Instagram, it will automatically be shared to Twitter and Facebook. That’s a real time saver. But if you want to have separate and distinct messages, you can either do it one at a time, or you can use a service like Loomly to post from a single dashboard. You can also use HootSuite, but it costs nearly $50 per month, compared to Loomly’s $26 per month. Which makes me think doing it one network at a time is ideal for most writers.

David wanted to know, “How important in LinkedIn for authors?”

That depends. It’s critical for business/non-fiction authors, not so much for fiction writers. You can find readers on LinkedIn, even if you’re a scifi/romance/mystery writer, but it’s going to be difficult to find them since most people go there looking for work-related content.

If you only have a limited amount of time and energy to focus on one or two social networks, stick with the ones that are going to do you the most good. LinkedIn won’t be that unless you’re writing business-related books.

Howard wondered, “What do you think about #BookTok on TikTok?”

Honestly, I haven’t watched it enough to have a strong opinion about it, but I will say that anyone who’s talking about books is doing important work, and they’re finding thousands of fans.

There are several channels/creators who have gotten very popular on TikTok talking about writing and books. So if you want to join their ranks, go for it. TikTok has become an important platform for a lot of people, mostly Gen Z, so you should take advantage of that.

Clare asked, “How does your intended audience shape how you brand yourself? For example, I write middle grade fantasy.”

That’s a great question, Clare, and almost worth its own blog article, if not an entire book!

Remember, a brand is an emotional response people have to our face and our name. (Or if you’re a company, the emotional response to your name and logo.) When you think about brands like McDonald’s, Nike, BP, or the Chicago Cubs, people have an emotional response to them. They love them or hate them.

So the emotional responses our readers have become our brand. We can shape and hone that brand ourselves, but ultimately, we’re not responsible for how people perceive us. We can do all sorts of great work and people’s emotional response can be “Yay!” “Ugh!” or “Meh.”

Having said all that, you should treat your personal brand almost like a persona or a character you play. That’s not to say you should lie about who you are. Rather, your personal branding efforts should match what your readers and fans expect of you.

If you’re a middle-grade fantasy writer, the kinds of things you share on social media should be about middle-grade fantasy subjects: swords, dragons, wizards, etc. It’s not really the place to write at length about the supply chain crisis or your thoughts on the January 6 hearings. You can do that elsewhere, but not on your author profiles because it doesn’t match what your readers want.

On the other hand, if you’re a political/current events writer, you don’t necessarily want to share your cosplay photos from Dragon Con.

So, in that sense, your audience shapes your personal branding efforts because you should give them what they want.

Cindi wanted to know, “Do you use some of the new social media platforms, Locals, Rumble, Spotify, and Truth Social?”

Not really. For one thing, there are thousands of social networks these days, compared to the few dozen there were when I first started doing all this in 2007. So I can’t even keep up if I wanted to.

Having said that, I’m not against using a new social network, and I’ve joined a few but I never stick with them. However, I’m always on the lookout for new alternatives to the ones I use now. Is there a new Twitter alternative? Where should I go if Facebook collapses? Is there something better than LinkedIn?

Ultimately, if I can find a network that looks like it won’t fail, doesn’t depend on rocket-like growth just to survive, and lets me quickly and easily post updates (this is one reason I haven’t gotten into TikTok yet), I’ll use it.

And finally, Mandy put a smile on my face when she said, “@erik awesome stuff (no question) :-)”

Thank you, Mandy! I appreciate it. I always have a great time speaking to the Writing Workshop classes.

If you have any other personal branding questions, just drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them. Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Taken from “10 Personal Branding Secrets for Authors” by Erik Deckers”

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Five Steps to Starting Your Nonprofit’s Storytelling Campaign

A few months ago, someone asked me about how to start a storytelling campaign for her nonprofit. She wanted to spread the word about how the nonprofit helps young people who are blind and have developmental disabilities. She teaches gardening and horticulture and helps her students to run a business and deal with a few clients. I gave her a basic strategy for a storytelling campaign that used different social media channels, as well as a website and blog.

Other nonprofits that want to tell their story can do more than just launching a newsletter or being active on Twitter. If you see your ongoing communication as one long story — think of it as a long-running TV series

This is a strategy any nonprofit could use to tell the stories about their efforts and the communities they serve. The goal is to help potential donors and volunteers get to know the people they’re helping. If you can put a face and name to your work, people are more likely to give.

This is one of the reasons nearly all fundraising letters have you “meet” one of their recipients. Someone who needs your help, and who has been helped by that organization. And you can help more people just like this one just by donating $10 per month.

1. What stories do you want to tell?

Before starting a storytelling campaign, you need to figure out what story you actually want to tell. A story can have a few parts to it, so you can have more than one focus.

In fact, you could think of your story as a TV show, where there is usually an A story, a B story, and a C story. The A story gets the most attention and time, the B story gets the second most, and the C story gets the least. In a 22-minute sitcom, the A story may get 9 – 11 minutes of storytime, the B story gets 6 – 8 minutes, and the C story gets 3 – 5 minutes.

So your A story could be how you help people through a meal delivery service, your B story could be your mobile health clinic, and your C story could be your future plan to open an apartment building with in-house medical facilities.

That means your meal delivery service gets the most “air time,” the mobile health clinic gets the second most, and the apartment building gets the least. That doesn’t mean you don’t talk about the B and C stories, or that they’re always second and third on the list of your blog articles and videos. Rather, it means they get to be the sole focus of your attention once in a while.

2. Identify your channels

Now you need to know where you want to promote your story. And you do that by figuring out where your target audience is. Essentially, you want to “fish where the fish are.”

If you do a lot of events where people are likely to share photos of themselves, then you want to be on Instagram. If you don’t have a huge visual component to your storytelling, then you can skip Instagram. If your audience is older, you should focus more on Facebook and skip Snapchat.

But you can also double up in a few places. Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can automate your posting between both networks. If you post things to Instagram, you can set it up so those things automatically post to Facebook. You can even use an automation service like IFTTT (If This, Then That) or Zapier to automatically push photos to Twitter.

Just don’t go nuts. Limit the number of social channels you join, rather than joining as many as you can. You may have heard a lot about Clubhouse, Fireside, Snapchat, and every other new tool people are buzzing about, but that doesn’t mean they’re worthy of your attention.

Instead, pick the ones that are well-established and show some signs of longevity. I normally recommend Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and a blog for most nonprofits. You could also use LinkedIn, but I typically advise against it unless your nonprofit deals with work — teaching reading and life skills, helping people develop skills to find a job, educational institutions, etc.

You’ll also want a weekly or monthly newsletter — your newsletter is where you’ll collect the email addresses of your donors, volunteers, and supporters. This list is your lifeblood because these are the people who keep you in business and help you support your mission.

3. Your channels will affect your content.

What do you have the capabilities and time to produce? What does your audience want? Do you have a lot of people who watch and share videos? Or do they prefer reading long-form content? You can figure that out just by asking them with a survey.

Once you know what they would prefer, start giving it to them. Maybe it’s a weekly 700-word blog article, maybe it’s daily photos of your birds of prey, or a weekly podcast interviewing other people in your nonprofit’s mission.

At the very least, I do recommend photos and blog articles. The blog helps with search engine optimization and your search rankings, but this is where most of your storytelling is going to happen. Your blog is where you get to explore the nitty-gritty of your work, explain your positions on policy decisions, analyze how new laws and regulations affect you. It can also provide you content for a newsletter.

And if you have the time and capabilities, consider a podcast or video series about your nonprofit’s greater mission. For example, if your nonprofit is about rehabilitating injured birds of prey, start an educational video or podcast series that teaches people about birds of prey, the different kinds of birds there are, and how they live.

4. How will you tell your stories?

We’ve done the easy part, now is the hard part. How do we tell your stories? Do you tell an individual’s story? Do you tell the group’s story? Your organization’s origin and success story?

Start with what amount to case studies and testimonials. Take one person who is involved with your organization, talk about their experience before they got involved, what they learned, and how it’s helped them afterward.

For example, your story would look like this: John had a problem. He was 100 pounds overweight, constantly tired, and was at risk of diabetes. He had tried different diets, but nothing had worked, and he was worried he was going to have serious illnesses in a couple years. So John started an exercise program at Major Payne’s Get Fit Boot Camp. In 9 months, John had lost 100 pounds, had plenty of energy, and reduced his risk for diabetes by 82%. He even grew back all his hair, married a supermodel, and won the lottery.

Basically, you can build an entire campaign on stories like this. You know what you need to write and tell, and you can place each of them into your A, B, and C stories.

And you can break them up so that for every three A stories you write, you write two B stories and one C story.

You can produce a video or shoot some pictures, write a blog article, share it on your chosen social channels — share it more than once in a week; three or four times per week is perfectly acceptable — and produce those stories once or twice a week.

5. What is your storytelling campaign’s throughline?

Throughline is another TV term. It’s the underlying theme of a movie or TV show. It’s not the story, but it’s the motivation behind the story.

For example, the throughline of the Captain America movies is “Cap hates bullies.” So everything we see him do is based on his intense dislike of bullies.

Your throughline is related to the purpose of your organization. It could be education, it could be housing, it could be creating awareness of a particular disease or societal problem.

If your purpose is education, your stories will show how you’re educating your target audience, such as adult literacy, helping at-risk youth, or animal rescue. Your stories won’t be about teaching, mentoring, or saving, but that will always run through your stories.

For example, you won’t do a video on “this is how we saved this dog” or even “The 12 steps we take to save dogs.” But you’ll write about a dog that you saved, cleaned, and adopted out to a loving family.

So your stories should include your throughline. Even if you were doing a “meet our staff” story, you would want to focus on how they help fulfill your purpose and mission.

Starting a storytelling campaign can be a little difficult, but if you just start with the basics — pick a couple channels, decide what story to tell, and follow your throughline — you’ll quickly figure out what to do and how to do it.

Don’t worry if creating stories is hard or you’re not very good at first. You’ll learn a lot, you’ll get better, and pretty soon you’ll be whipping out those stories, editing those videos, and writing those blog articles like they’re second nature. As long as you build a good storytelling campaign framework, you can easily see what works and what doesn’t work, and you’ll have a formula to follow with every new story you write.

Photo credit: Tumisu (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
Photo credit: StockSnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Should I Create Multiple Twitter Accounts?

A personal branding question I’m regularly asked by authors, artists, and other creative types is whether someone should have multiple Twitter accounts. In fact, someone posted that very question to an audio theater Facebook group I belong to:

Looking for opinions regarding Twitter: Is it better to have separate accounts for each show you’re creating, or just one main company account that posts on behalf of all shows? I’ve seen it both ways so I was interested in seeing which way people like more.

Well, to start with, you may have seen it both ways, but those “more than one account” people are probably wrong. I’ve seen people run red lights, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should do it.

I’ve seen people create Twitter accounts for movies, TV shows, books, plays, and any other creative venture you could name. People get excited about a project, and they want to build some buzz around it, so they create social media accounts around that one project.

That’s not the best way to go about things, because those projects typically have a short life, which means the Twitter accounts do, too. Then, the creators are off onto another creative venture, creating yet another social media account.

So let me just say this: Create a single account for yourself or your creative group as the brand. Focus all your energy into building that account.

Think of your favorite actor. Don’t you follow them through their variety of performances? Wouldn’t it be a pain in the ass if you had to re-find them for each character they played? Every time a show or movie ends, you have to wait to find out what their next role is, follow them, and soak in all the goodness, until that role ends. And then you repeat the process.

Think of how painful that would be if your favorite musician launched a new Twitter account every time they recorded a new album.

Can you imagine how much of a time waster it would be if your favorite painter created a Twitter account for every new painting they did? Bob Ross would have created 403 Twitter accounts just for his show paintings, although the actual number may be closer to 30,000.

It’s About Your Personal Brand

You’re better off focusing your energy and efforts on building your personal brand, or your troupe’s brand because that’s the thing people are interested in. Just like you have your favorite performer that you follow from project to project, people will follow you along your creative journey as well. They don’t start and stop with each project, they’re with you every step of the way.

Spend your time building an audience for your group, getting people emotionally invested in that account, and coming to rely on it for news and information about what you’re doing. Have conversations with people with that account, so people are more likely to like and trust it.

Imagine putting all that time and energy into a project account, only to have to repeat the effort several months later. And then doing it again a year after that.

You would have to repeat the brand-building exercise over and over, trying to re-convince your audience from the last show to join you on the new account, and then re-re-convincing them on the one after that. And the next one. And the next one.

By having an account that spans for years, you can even give your new fans a look at your old history as they look back to see what else you have done. As your account grows and ages, people can take a retrospective look at your catalog of work, which they can’t do if you only have a Twitter account that lasts for a year or two.

Photo credit: Mariamichelle (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Sportswriters, Don’t Give Up Game Recaps for Social Media

I was listening to a recent episode of Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, and his interview with Langston Newsome, a sportswriter with the Columbia (Missouri) Tribune. Jeff talks to sportswriters and other writers about the art of writing and state of journalism.

In this episode, Jeff and Langston discussed the need for game recaps — also called “gamers” in the sports journalism biz — and whether there was a need for it.

Langston said he thought gamers were worthless because “I’m not reading the 600-word gamer on any site anymore.”

“Stop the presses, Jimmy! I got the scoop of the century!”
The need for gamers is an ongoing discussion in many sports departments, as sportswriters and editors struggle with whether they need to write a recap of the big plays and turning points in each matchup, or whether the networks’ and teams’ Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts are filling the gap and shoving traditional gamers to the side.

As a social media professional, I can tell you that social media is not the panacea everyone thinks it is. As much as we think this is an online digital world, and we can do away with things like newspapers, libraries, paper books, and even sports gamers, we can’t. We still live in an old-school world that relies on old-school methods and old-school channels of communication.

Not everyone watches games live; they still want to read about what happened. Maybe they don’t live in the area where the game is broadcast. Maybe they don’t have cable. Maybe they had two games they wanted to see.

Not everyone pays attention to teams’ social media; they don’t see the updates that are happening in real time. Maybe they’re at work. Maybe they don’t follow the teams’ social accounts. Maybe they don’t have social media themselves.

Not everyone is online in the first place; they don’t have the ability to see those updates when they’re happening. Maybe they can’t afford a smartphone. Maybe they don’t have Internet access. Maybe they’re seniors who don’t want to deal with the Internet. (These are your biggest newspaper readers, and they’re part of the biggest demographic in the country; 97 million people born between 1928 – 1964.)

Sportswriters, don’t give up on gamers. There’s still a need for them, just as much as there’s a need for analysis and features.

Gamers are glimpses into the past, social updates are real-time, have-to-be-present highlights.

Gamers can focus on some of the smaller plays and interesting facts, social updates only focus on the big, big plays, not the little things.

Don’t Abandon the Old-School Just Yet

One of the favorite digital marketing stats that gets bandied about is that roughly 50% of the country never reads a newspaper. But that means that roughly 50% of the country still reads a newspaper, even if it’s once a week, even if it’s online.

According to a Statista.com report, as of May 2017,

  • 54% of people 60 years and older read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • 44% of people between 30 – 59 read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • Only 28% of people between 18 – 29 read a print newspaper once a week or more.*

* These are the people to gear digital news toward. They’re the ones looking at game highlights online and following teams’ social media accounts.

While the need for gamers may eventually go away, that day is not today. There are still plenty of people old enough to keep reading newspapers — there are 72.56 million Baby Boomers in the U.S., people born between 1946 – 1964 and another 24.44 million born between 1928 – 1945 — and they’re not embracing digital.

So sportswriters should keep writing gamers for as long as there’s a need and an audience. Don’t go by your own viewing and reading habits to determine what’s acceptable and wanted by 97 million other people in this country.

Besides, gamers help you become a better writer in the long run.