So remember how last week I talked about this tweet and how it had been retweeted nearly 400 times and I had my 15 minutes of Twitter fame? Yeah, I pretty much figured things would fizzle out over the weekend, but that wasn't the case. It kept getting retweeted and favorited again and again. In fact, William Gibson and Jodi Picoult even went to so far as to retweet it. Even right now as I type this the tweet is being retweeted and favorited. Sorta wild as, again, the tweet was never supposed to be much of anything at all.
As I mentioned last week, I was engaged by several people, either agreeing with the tweet or disagreeing. And this weekend was a lot more of the same. The most common counterpoint is that a writer writes a book and it can sell a million times, but a barista only makes one cup of coffee per person. Okay, as I mentioned before, the coffee/book thing isn't a great analogy. It was never supposed to be profound. But the point, really, is nowadays people don't want to pay for digital content. For them if it's not tangible, then they shouldn't have to pay for it. Many who tweeted me saw this point and agreed. Others still harped on the whole apples and oranges comparison (not to mention six bucks is way too expensive for a cup of coffee -- I had meant to put specialty coffee but it wouldn't fit in the original tweet). The former, I believe, are writers (and app developers, who also chimed in); the latter ... not writers (or app developers).
Also, judging by many of the responses, people seem to think writers sell a lot of books and make a lot of money. Which, of course, is very far from the truth. But that's the mindset, it seems, at least currently.
More than one person has congratulated me on the success of this tweet, and I'm like, it's just a stupid tweet. It doesn't mean anything. It's not like it has translated to a bunch of book sales or something. I've gained quite a few followers in the last couple of days, which is nice I guess, but anybody who knows me knows I don't really care about stuff like that. The only thing I have really come to learn from this whole experience is that being famous must be extremely exhausting.
Now, let me state clearly, I am not saying I am famous or even close to it. But famous actors and writers who have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers on Twitter, they deal with the barrage of mentions every day. It becomes time-consuming skimming through all of them. As I mentioned, I only engaged a few, because I didn't have time or the patience to engage everyone. Normally if someone tweets me, I try to make some kind of response. After all, Twitter really is supposed to be social, a good conversation. But with what I experienced here ... it's like being on stage and a whole crowd of people yelling at you at once.
So anyway, my 15 minutes of Twitter fame has been extended a bit. So far I've had nearly 4,000 retweets, 700 favorites. So my question: where can I turn all that Twitter currency in for cash?
