Seven and a half minutes

So, I have the 900 Facebook friends, the 400 linked in connections, and the 1300 twitter followers. 2,600 contacts, though of course, there’s overlap.

So, I’ve sunk thousands of hours into Facebook over the last decade, less into twitter or Linked in, but still, I’ve been there, and of course, maintained this blog, maybe a few hundred hours over the years.

There’s this tendency to see all this building a kind of equity; as something useful beyond its obvious meaning, friendship, connection, conversation.

So I spam out a link to my new portfolio site, stuff a lot of folks have seen already, to be fair, but still, this is what happens:

We do the math, and we see seven and a half minutes of engagement spread over 25 people.

One in a thousand response rate, 18 seconds per response. And then? Flatline.

He’s dead, Jim.

No contact. No messages. No contracts. No work. Nothing at all. Well, seven and a half minutes, shared by one in a thousand people.

Look, I get that my work isn’t genius, that my feeds aren’t optimized for anything to do with my professional interests. My feeds are designed by billionaires for billionaires.

But I have spent maybe two hours a day on average, seven days a week, 365 days a year, for ten years. That’s 6720 hours. That’s a conservative estimate.

But what I am telling myself, reminding myself, with this post is that thousands of hours of time ‘invested’ over the last fifteen years earned me seven and a half minutes of rubber necking and not a single viable lead.

Not a single penny.

call it 6000 hours, 500 words an hour, 3 million words divided by 50,000 per novel…

Sixty novels.

Sixty.

Let’s say I split the time, between novels, and going to conventions to schmooze with editors, other authors, agents.

Uh. I’m pushing 30 books at people for 3000 hours.

My social media activity is very nearly worthless in every sense of that word. Or rather, it’s value beyond itself, beyond what you get from it, is negligible. I get that it has meant a lot to others, and I like that. I have had some people reach through social media towards me, in heart warming ways. But what would 500 hours of IRL networking have done?

If you like making sandcastles, you should make them. You can remember them, before they’re wiped away, you can even take a photo.

But sandcastles aren’t real estate.

And social media isn’t really social.

It’s like the carbon dioxide hissing away into nothing when you pop open a soda.

Gas diluting itself into undetectability.

The gas molecules are the hours of your life.

What do you want to do with them?