myspace, facebook - why bother?

I joined myspace a year ago and facebook in June. The main reason I joined myspace was to research the children's book market. By adding global contacts focusing on children's authors, book publishers and literary agents, I soon had a small network of 85 'friends' across the globe from San Francisco to Perth.

I joined facebook in June when I began to get bored of myspace but found that Nathan Bransford's blog that I'd subscribed to kept drawing me back there(I receive emails alerts).

Nathan Bransford is an agent with Curtis Brown in San Francisco and a prolific writer of fabulously informative blog posts about how to get published, with links to other agents and editors in book publishing (i.e. the art of reading rejection letters and writing query letters). I entered his writing competition 'The Largely Indispensable First Paragraph Challenge' where authors were invited to submit the opening paragraph of their novel. I spread the word on facebook and a few SCBWI members also entered. There were 600 entries and I read them all - this wasn't a 'children's authors only' challenge so it was a great chance to face the competition from other genres.

Alix Parker and I have been preparing to submit our novel, THE MAGIC CAFE, for the last few months and as a result of Nathan Bransford's competition, we rewrote the opening chapter, posted it on our blog foxvox and submitted THE MAGIC CAFE to agents and a publisher last week. The publisher requested the complete manuscript the day after we submitted - so something must be working!

I log on everyday to myspace, even if only to change the words in my status bar (it currently reads 'taking a day off - exhausted'). Recently, I posted my first news bulletin announcing 'Book Accepted By Andersen Press'

My myspace network is about the right size now for me to maintain and even if it is only a fad, I'm making the most of it while it lasts.

Facebook offers a slightly different networking experience. I've joined various children's book groups and added the application 'Visual Bookshelf' showing my collection of over 50 children's books I've read recently and 2 with my reviews. Apparently, three newspapers have quoted my review of Oswald and the End of The World by Andrew Strong. I also like facebook's 'note' feature. It's basically a blog but it feels more like a place to write about the other side of my working life - my day and sometimes night job - acting. Incidentally, my acting agent has a link to mypsace from my profile on their website.

One main disadvantage of social networking is it's time-consuming. I've already spent longer than I planned to write this! I've run out of time now but as you know, networking is all about links so if you'd like to get in touch, I am here and here if you want to join me!