All writers, indie or not, have to harness the power of social media these days. It’s a necessary tool for promotion of your book and your brand.

At the same time, this kind of PR work can consume your life.  Ask any author who has at least one book out and is working on another about the struggle to balance promotion and writing.  It’s not easy.

So the wonderful powers that be on the internet have come up with programs that allow us to manage social media, to schedule tweets and to track what elements are working for us. I can sit down on a Sunday night and schedule tweets for an entire week (I usually don’t; a day ahead is the best I’ve been able to do!).  I can write posts for my site here and have them appear exactly when I want them.

Of course, there are some people who believe that this kind of scheduling is wrong.  One author recently claimed that the true impact of social media lies in its immediacy, that by ‘manipulating’ it in this way, we are somehow cheating.

I disagree.  I am a writer, yes.  However, I am also a wife, a mom who homeschools, a caretaker of 20 month old. . .even with an iPhone, I can hardly be tied to the internet twelve hours a day. At the same time, in the current climate, being absent from social media even for a day can drastically impact standing and sales.

Scheduling social media makes my life possible. I try to keep even my scheduled tweets and posts fresh and timely.

I don’t call that manipulating; I call it managing.