The Influence of Social Media on My Life

Proposing to someone is nerve-wracking enough without having the worry of whether the wifi is going to work while you’re doing it.

“You can post it later,” I told my nervous boyfriend, as he attempted to upload his guest post to my blog.

Why had my boyfriend written me a guest post?

I should rewind back to June 2008, when I took my first significant steps into the world of social media with the creation of my blog Shop Girl Diaries. It was a weekly account of what it was like to work in my parents’ eccentric chandelier shop. I was studying journalism in the evening and my tutor was always saying: Find your niche! The shop was mine. I wrote about the barterers, the thieves, the good customers and the ones who visited to the shop to sell us stuff rather than spend money!

Blogging was my way of getting on with the job of writing and finding readers while literary agents and magazine editors dithered over whether to send me their standard rejection letter or ignore my advances altogether. I was twenty four years old and I already felt like I had been writing for a lifetime.

Six months into blogging, I left my link on Salt Publishing’s Facebook wall. Miraculously, they didn’t treat it like spam, but instead followed the link to my blog and started reading. A week later they contacted me via Facebook asking me whether I would write a book based on my blog. My book, Shop Girl Diaries, was born a year later, recounting my journey from a shop girl to a published author.

After the book was published I invited the characters from the book to write a guest post. I was chuffed when my boyfriend, aka ‘the Date’, accepted the challenge. Little did I know his guest post would lead to a marriage proposal.

Yes, in case you were wondering, the wifi did work.

That my blog had led to a traditional book deal generated lots of interest. I started running blog workshops and being asked to write articles about social media. My classes started off very small – once only one person turned up! But gradually, as I continued to blog and write about my experience, people started contacting me to speak at literary festivals and universities. I said ‘yes’ to every request. Shy people love social media because it makes networking less daunting, but for me, social media led me to plenty of public speaking events and gave me the chance to grow in confidence.

Shop Girl Diaries is just the beginning of social media’s influence on my life. My next book, Spray Painted Bananas, later traditionally published and renamed The Temp, also began online. I uploaded the novel to the digital platform, Wattpad, chapter by chapter. It’s a quirky romantic comedy about how you can become famous for anything if you shout loud enough. Every morning I’d wake up to all these incredibly positive comments left by North American readers wanting to know what happened next. I can only describe it as having a bunch of cheerleaders behind me as I wrote. It was wonderful.

Towards the end of the novel, I needed my hero to write a poem. Since my poetry skills fall in the ‘Roses are Red’ category, I reached out to Twitter for help. The lovely Isabel Rogers, @isabelwriter, responded with enthusiasm and supplied the poem a few days later.

Thanks to Isabel, I finished a tricky chapter and then the book. One million visits to my serialised novel meant agents finally took me seriously. I signed with MBA, and finally, eight months later I agreed to a two book deal with Harper Collins’ imprint Harper Impulse.

My new book #PleaseRetweet is a comedy about our obsession with social media. May Sparks, a social media whizz, has to look after the online profiles of C-list celebrities who have a tendency to put their foot in things. It’s about the gap between people’s online lives and their real lives. It was fun to write and get to tease myself, as well as express some of my concerns about how disconnected we are from the present moment because we’re always trying to document it. I was at a bar the other day and three friends sitting together spent the whole time on their phones instead of talking each other. It’s a common sight and I think it’s really sad!

I strive to use social media creatively. Would I have got three books published without it? It definitely would have taken me longer. Being on social media hasn’t just helped me get books commissioned either. More recently I found a job writing reviews for a magazine in Mallorca, thanks to coming across a tweet announcing they were looking for writers. If I hadn’t used Twitter as a search engine, I would never have learned to dive. Well, you can’t review a diving course without having a go, can you?

Social media hasn’t just influenced my career, it is a part of my life. Right now, I’m in Colombia because my wonderful father-in-law passed away last week. The outpouring of love and affection on Facebook has been a great comfort to my husband. With such an international family it’s not easy to pop over and give our loved ones a hug, but at least with social media we can all keep in touch.

My next writing project will also require an internet connection and readers are going to have the chance to influence the story! I can’t say too much more now as it’s very early days. All I can say is that if it wasn’t for my activity on social media this new door wouldn’t have opened. I’m walking through it now and finding my way as I go. If you want to learn more I’ll be on Twitter and Facebook. But you probably guessed that already!

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Tags: #pleaseretweet, featured, social media addiction, twitter, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing