Speculative Fiction And Social Media

You may or may not be on Facebook and/or Twitter, but I’ve been hanging out at Facebook for a while now and getting the hang of Twitter slowly but surely.

I see some real advantages to these new forms of communication, the main one being the opportunity to reconnect with people I thought I’d lost track of for good. It’s a kick for me to see pictures of my former students, all grown up now, and to find out where they’re living, who they married, how many kids they have … daily stuff. After all, that’s how we knew each other when I taught them.

Some, I know, do stop by A Christian Worldview of Fiction from time to time, but Facebook allows us to “meet in the hall” and say hi as we used to do. It’s brief and incomplete, to be sure, but still far better than nothing, from my perspective.

And then there are readers who like what I like, or something close to it—fans of fantasy and, more generally, speculative fiction. Some months ago, a handful of us who were writing for the team blog Speculative Faith revived our efforts. We invited new writers to join us and saved Friday for guest bloggers. It’s been a great success.

In addition, our new webmaster set up a Facebook account. For a time, all we did there was link to the blog and invite people to “like” the site.

Then a couple weeks ago, I got the idea to add a daily “Book News” feature. I invited speculative writers to include their book news as they wished if there wasn’t already a news feature posted that day. Or they could send me their news and I’d post it. We’ve had a good response—more people following, more people “liking”—though I think some might be shy about posting their notices.

I have to say, I really like this. Some of you might remember that I’d started a newsletter, Latest In Spec, to pass along news about Christian speculative literature. While it was a good idea, I never made it work the way I envisioned. Too often the “news” was already old by the time it got into the hands of interested people, and to be honest, few people really like to read the personals. That’s what LIS was like.

Now at Spec Faith Facebook, we can include news tidbits in a timely manner. And far more people can become informed since friends of friends may also see the notices.

Today we have another development. CSFF Blog Tour is now on Facebook too. I’m excited about this opportunity to be more visible.

I want to see as many people learn about the tour as possible. I’m constantly finding a pocket of Christian speculative literature fans here and there, many who are still ignorant of the books that are out there for them to enjoy. Any new way of getting the word out is a plus as far as I’m concerned.