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In episode 86, we discussed first steps you can take to launch your social media presence. I suggested you could start simple and slow by establishing a bare-minimum presence at each of the big social media platforms.\n\nI encouraged you to secure your avatar, your handle, your username\u2014ideally using your author name\u2014and fill out your profile or bio at the places you think sound fun or useful for the writing you do (and where you think your readers will hang out).\n\nAll of this was in the context of building a writing platform and using social media as one tool to do so.\n\nBut consider this. Something motivated you to want to write and publish a book that would require a platform\u2014and part of what motivated you was surely the reader. Not a reader named Shirley, but you know what I mean. Part of you must want to write for an actual person who will open your book and take in the message or story in its pages and be affected by it, changed in some way, maybe even transformed.\n\nIf you write nonfiction, maybe you have ideas to share or problems you can solve for the reader. If you're a science writer, you might be assembling research to pass along so readers can be better informed. If you write fiction, maybe you want to connect with the readers' emotions and make them laugh and cry and feel shocked or jubilant.\n\nHere\u2019s the thing: you can start impacting readers right now. Through social media, in small doses and with creativity, you can press \u201cpublish\u201d and make a difference in people\u2019s lives without waiting two or more years for a book release.\n\nIsn\u2019t that exciting to think about?\nPoetry\xa0on Twitter\nInstead of writing entire poems, submitting them to multiple literary magazines and waiting months to hear back, you can wake up one morning struck by an interaction or scene. Jot out just a line or two, marry it with an image, and share it on Twitter. Just like that, you\u2019ve shared beauty with followers who happen upon it.\n\nWhile your fully developed, polished poems are under consideration via Submittable, you can still be practicing the art in small ways, enjoying the satisfaction of publishing snippets of your own work as they come to you in your everyday life.\nNonfiction on Facebook\nIf your passion about a topic has led you to research and outline a nonfiction book that you plan to pitch to a publisher, why not share tiny tidbits on Facebook\u2014maybe an excerpt from an interesting study that helped you see the subject from a new angle. You could share a quote. You can microblog about the material as your long-form project comes together, getting people to think about this topic, generating interest, demonstrating your knowledge, passion, and understanding. Maybe one of your Facebook updates will contain and convey exactly what someone needs to know.\n\nYou can help people. Right this minute.\nFiction on Instagram\nYou\u2019re a novelist, let\u2019s say. Why not tell your story in installments on Instagram? You\u2019ll be like a modern-day Dickens, publishing serially. Others have done this or are in the midst of their stories. Rachel Hulin wrote Hey Harry Hey Matilda on Instagram. Another author, Adam Hurly, draws sketches to go with each installment of his story on Instagram. In an interview, Hurly said:\nMy goal with this is to create more opportunities and to show people that there are ways, innovative ways, to tell the stories you want to tell. There are ways to find an audience, you just have to be ahead of the curve with it.\nWhy wait for a publisher to green light your project? Write some great short stories, coupling installments or scenes with images, and publish them on Instagram. Be ahead of the curve.\nMix and Match Genres with Social Media\nYou can mix and match, of course. Poets love Instagram, and memoir is Facebook or Instagram-ready.\n\nA young woman named Caroline Calloway went off to Cambridge. She shared her adventures in one Instagram post after another, like micro-essays, and seems to have a memoir in the works.