The best piece of author branding advice I’ve received to date was to be myself in my social media interactions. So that’s what I am; an oddball mix of England, America, dogs, horses, gardens, world travels, cream teas, books, epic fails and homesickness all bundled up in self-deprecating humour. And, it seems, I’m slowly finding my tribe online.
But one day I missed the mark. I shared me on a bad day.
The US administration began separating children from their families at the border. That should have been a bad day for all of us. But I took it very hard. After all, I write about finding home, about separation from home, about missing home. I’m also an immigrant and a mother. I couldn’t imagine losing my children in exchange for a shot at a safe home. I. Just. Couldn’t.
So, I posted the following on Instagram and Twitter on June 20th, along with a photo of one of my dogs staring up into the camera: ‘Not feeling very funny today. I’ll be making a long journey with this face soon. If he’s taken away at immigration, I’ll die. And he’s just a dog!’ I hash tagged ‘children first’, ‘immigration’, ‘keep families together’ and ‘no separation’.
Within a few hours, I lost five percent of my Instagram followers.
Now, I’m no JK Rowling with millions hanging on my every word. Five percent can hardly be defined as a mass exodus in my case. But to me it was significant. We indie authors compete for attention against millions of other voices and I treasure each follower on my social media platforms. I’m honoured you’d want to spend a few seconds of your day with me. Losing you hurts.
I asked myself why I lost followers. Was the subject matter unexpected, coming from goofy old me? Was it taken as politically biased? I didn’t mean it to be. I figured every affiliation would be struck dumb by the cruelty. Were followers just jaded by the barrage of negativity? Possibly. I know I was exhausted by it. Maybe you were all bots and got booted at that particular moment. Truth is, I don’t know what happened. But, slowly, over the next few days, I came to this conclusion: I don’t care what happened. If you look back at the list of criteria for being me, you won’t find ‘cruel’. And I won’t let ‘cruel’ be added to that list by default because I didn’t speak up.
As I write this, an effort is underway to reunite families. That’s good. It’s a better day. But what about the next bad day? Will my followers tolerate me sharing my bad days? Guess what? That’s the last time I’ll ask that question. Because if you want me to be myself ‒ and I hope you do ‒ you’ll need to add ‘not cruel’ to the list of fun facts about me.
Note to self: being you is not going to please everyone. Be you anyway.
Find me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/author.traceygemmell/
Twitter https://twitter.com/TraceyGemmell17
Absolutely, Tracey. Be yourself. Don’t change to please other people! If they stick around long enough and read all your posts, they’ll know you are someone worth knowing! xx
Thank you! That means a lot to me.
Agreed. I try to be fairly diplomatic on my social media feeds, but some issues seem to be so clearly leaning to right vs wrong (not the tricky grey area in the middle) that it just wouldn’t be authentic to skip over them. History is unfortunately too full of otherwise decent folk who didn’t take a stand, for fear of upsetting people or drawing attention to themselves. I know you wouldn’t feel right to compromise your values for the sake of a few follows. In fact, I don’t think you missed the mark at all.
That bit about being authentic – YES! If we try to please everyone, we lose ourselves, don’t we? Thank you for your input and support.