How much engagement do I get on my various social media?

Here's the same post on 4 different social media platforms. First after an hour on each.

Those are follower/like ratios of:

Twitter --- 5,300

Bluesky --- 550

Threads --- 400 

Facebook --- 3,400

And after 4 hours this had become:

Twitter --- 3,700

Bluesky --- 366 + 2 reposts!

Threads --- 327 

Facebook --- 785

So Twitter is by far the worst for engagement. And even with 37,000 followers it was the worst in absolute terms too.

Bluesky was the best, but surprisingly Threads was also very good.

Facebook is largely garbage these days.

This was this morning's feed and it's typical for what I see:

1. Adverts for groups I might like

2. random account it wants me to follow

3. random account it wants me to follow

4. advert

5. random account it wants me to follow

6. Friend post

7. reels from random accounts

8. random account it wants me to follow

9. advert

10. random account it wants me to follow

11. random account it wants me to follow

12. Friend post

13. random account it wants me to follow

14. advert

With over 10,000 friends and followers I get very little engagement, and it's clearly being deluged in this never ending stream of "follow this" rubbish that's pushing people away. It's not rocket science, but apparently it's too complicated for Mark Zuckerberg. If it was just the adverts ... well ... ok. But why shove all these random people/pages down my throat when what I want to see is the people I have chosen to friend?

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Three Million!

Damn, January slipped by without a post!

In order to stop the rot, let me blog about having passed another milestone (likely on the road to obscurity, but you can't have it all).

Back in 2014 I posted about selling my first half million books. 

And at the start of 2016 I blogged to remark that I'd sold my first million.

It's been a while and that same heady sales rate has not been sustained in the nearly 9 years since then. Plus, I don't actually look at sales figures - it's not good for anyone's mental health to watch the needle on what is effectively your popularity and livelihood flicker back and forth. However, I can say with confidence that I have passed the three million mark in global sales.

The bulk of those sales are in English, roughly evenly divided between the UK (plus Australia and New Zealand) and the US (plus Canada). Why that split isn't more in line with the population numbers, I don't know!

I'm published in 28 languages, but for some of them it's just a single book that sold poorly. Most recently I've had my first contracts for books in Bengali (A publisher in Bangladesh), Ukrainian, and Arabic (A published in Egypt). It was nice to get the Ukrainian deal after pulling out of my Russian ones to show solidarity.

You might think that this has made me rich. I'm certainly not poor, but fact is that 14 years of whatever flavour of "best selling" I've been means that at approaching 60 years old I could just about buy an average priced detacted house in London (in the suburbs). It's not exactly "rock star", though I am better off than most of the populace and have a job I enjoy doing. So, in short, it's been a blessing and one for which I'm very grateful.

I've alway strived to plan/live/save as if this writing business is something that could vanish in an instant. The trajectory of most author careers is a modest boom followed by a rapid return to the day job as sales trail back down to insignificant. I'm very aware that my next book might not sell and that opportunities can vanish swiftly.

The fact that at least three million copies of my books have found their way onto people's shelves and kindles and phones is ... well, it's at once both mind blowing and also largely academic. If there were instead thirty million, or three hundred thousand, or thirty thousand, it would feel much the same emotionally. Though obviously each of those figures leads to very different financial outcomes.

Anyway - thanks for sticking with me. And if I ever make it to 5 million, I'll let you know.

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