Vicki Delany takes over Facebook

 Yesterday was a special day. My great friend, travel buddy, and writer extraordinaire threw a Facebook party to celebrate the release of her 50th book. 50th!!! Vicki is a former long-time member of Type M for Murder, and she has been variously described as "the queen of cosies", "a one-woman crime wave" and "the energizer bunny of mystery fiction". In her twenty-one years since publishing her first novel, she has written nine different series and several standalone thrillers across a wide spectrum. Police Procedurals (Constable Molly Smith), historical (Klondike mysteries), adult literacy novels, and more recently several cosy series which she keeps in the air simultaneously. She now writes about three books a year, while the rest of us struggle to write one. It's a feat worth celebrating!

For her celebration, she used a format more familiar to cosy writers than to those of us who hang out in the darker shadows of the mystery genre, but since she herself has gone over to the light side, that seems fitting. The cosy community, both readers and writers, is a close-knit community bonded by several blogs and Facebook groups where they share each other's news (and recipes) and build a powerful network for the cosy brand. When Vicki first invited me to participate in her party, I had never heard of the idea, but it's apparently a common promotional approach among cosy writers.

The idea is to set up an event on Facebook and invite a group of authors to "take over" your feed for a specified part of it to talk about some theme. Interested readers are invited to join the event and participate in the discussions.  In this case, the theme was the celebration of Vicki's fiftieth book, WEDDING BELLS AND DEATH KNELLS. Beyond that, authors could do whatever they wanted. In her usual style, Vicki set about with focus and determination to plan the event long in advance  She invited select author friends and fellow cosy writers to sign up, she developed a day-long roster of writers, gave each of us a specific thirty-minute time slot to lead the discussion, and set about making each of us "hosts" on her page for that thirty minutes so that we could control the discussion. Twenty-eight authors, each hosting a thirty minutes segment over a 14-hour period. What could possibly go wrong?

The first problem was that although she could invite most of the authors to be hosts on her Facebook feed without difficulty, there was a subset of us (myself included) that couldn't get the invitation. For days we tried various tech strategies to solve the problem, but no dice. We had to find another way to participate without being hosts. We solved this by having us comment under posts hosted by Vicki, and although that worked reasonably well, it did mean that our comments and replies did not always show up in the feed and the continuity of the discussion was fragmented. 

One of the phots I had no time for

The second problem was that even some of those who were privileged with host status couldn't get posted in the right place. With a changeover of authors every thirty minutes, the posts and comments were coming so fast and furious that it was difficult to keep up, or to find a particular post or comment. Perhaps it was Facebook being its usual fickle self choosing at whim which posts it wanted to show. 

The third problem was was that old favourite – unreliable internet. We've all been in virtual meetings or Zoom calls where one of the participants suddenly vanishes because their internet crashed. Vicki lives in the country, and when this happened to her at the height of her party, she had to scramble. She solved it by using her phone's hotspot until her internet was restored, but it could have ruined the party for sure.

Technical glitches and participants' varying skills in solving them will always be challenges when we try to organize a large, long-lasting event with constant changes of hosts and posts. From what I could see, however, authors were enthusiastic and well-prepared. Most of the authors were from the cosy community and they had neat things like jigsaw puzzles, recipes, and interesting promo photos ready to post, and readers were engaged and eager to comment. From the inside, it felt like chaos when I was trying to find new comments (Facebook has to be constantly refreshed), keep up with the flow, and type in a coherent reply. I wanted to share some of our travel photos, but only got through about half my planned photos in my thirty minutes. Live and learn. But I think Vicki should be very pleased with the day, (although tired and in need of several glasses of wine).

I will be very interested to hear others' experiences with this type of promo. It's a great idea, but it's a lot of work and not without its moments of frustration and panic. Planning well in advance, anticipating the unexpected, like internet crashes, and having a Plan B, consulting with others who've done it before, and making sure you have quick communication capability with the authors hosting will help make it run more smoothly. Oh, and a huge sense of humour.

Facebook is not an intuitive or versatile platform, but is there an another option?