Sometimes, I don't work. This might sound like I'm posturing decadently, but the reality is that I'm a contractor and work can be unpredictable. Of late I've had a lot of downtime, during which I've cultivated this blog. Hopefully that will change soon, especially as I'm currently writing this while drinking a glass of Sauvignon Plonk at the Fortnum & Mason's bar at Heathrow Terminal 5. Yes, I could have gone to the 'Spoons, wedged in at the end of the terminal's shopping parade, conveniently next to the toilets. However, I'm feeling optimistic. March and the foreseeable future look very busy, so in the meantime I'm going on holiday, breaking a long, miserly streak. When my last paying contract ran out last year, I set myself some goals. A challenge, to keep myself busy while I waited for the economy to sort its shit out. I was aware I may be in for a long wait, but I wanted to use the free time I had fruitfully. I did not want to find myself several months hence, rueing the way I had frittered my time.
My grand plan was this – to build myself a profile on social media. The notion may well have occurred to some of you reading this now, and I apologise if any of it is triggering. It's no easy task, and cannot be honestly evaluated as a huge success. Nonetheless it has been and will continue to be an experiment.
As an ex-physicist, I'm aware that experiments typically have an introduction, method, results and conclusion. So in the spirit of scientific rigour, I present them here.
INTRODUCTION
The ultimate goal of this experiment is to sell books. This shall be the ultimate measure of success – what is known in the sales game as conversion. Increased followers across social media would be nice, but not as nice as actually getting people to read my stuff.
METHOD
Many years ago I self-published my novel Dead Penguins on Amazon. It did the usual brief trade with friends then promptly disappeared into the deep, deep ranks of Amazon's back catalogue. I have written more since, but they are currently stuck in a strange mental holding pattern of my own devising. I would like them to be trad published, but I'm open to other options still. It strikes me that these days even trad published authors are expected to have a good social media following. To an extent, they still have to contribute to the book's marketing. There's no getting away from it – I would have to build one wherever I go.
I had already started this blog. My plan was to funnel potential readers here from social media, after which they would hopefully become curious about my novel. I also had an idea for a second blog, based on some 3D photography I did while in Antarctica. I figured this may be of some interest to people, and add them to the general funnel effect I was hoping to achieve.
On the social media front, I already had a Facebook page for Dead Penguins that I hadn't updated in years. I created a new one for Lambert T Marx, along with profiles for Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky and TikTok. For the majority of that, I used Buffer to schedule posts across all platforms and watched my meagre stats obsessively.
TikTok was another matter entirely. I wanted to do something different with this, but so far I've been sidetracked down the hugely enjoyable direction of buying a small MIDI keyboard, learning to use Ableton and picking up some crude video editing tricks. I will return to this at a later date. For now, it is not the focus of this blog.
RESULTS
I sold zero books. Both my blogs have however had a modest but pleasing amount of traffic. This blog in particular, while still not doing numbers that would get anyone sensible excited, has been increasing in readership the more I post. The social media posts don't get much engagement, but they are certainly driving traffic. They are however all plagued by bots which DM me with shallow attempts to sell me services I do not want.
CONCLUSION
I've pulled back on some of my activity. I no longer put out daily photos to promote the Antarctic blog. This doesn't appear to have made any difference to its traffic. That blog has become its own thing and I will continue it to its own conclusion because I'm proud of it in its own right, and not just as a tool for flogging books. I'll continue updating this blog too. I don't imagine it will suddenly start accruing huge numbers of readers, no matter how much I bait Elon Musk fans, but it's a good habit to have and a handy way of turning an expensive glass of airport wine into something I hope is of use to anyone else looking for their readers.
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