12 Resolutions for 2012

Without knowing how things are going to pan out on the work/money front in the next year, here’s my not-very-taxing list of achievable resolutions for 2012. And the probability of my actually doing any of them. (I’ll probably add more later, but this will do for now.)

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#74 Tweet sensations (twensations?)

Or ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter’.

Although I’ve had an account for about a year, solely to alert more people when I have a new blog post, it’s only in the past three weeks that I’ve actually started using it properly.

On previous visits I’d felt like I was at a party where I didn’t really know anyone. I was hovering on the edge of a circle of cool people, hoping they’d notice me, eavesdropping on female national newspaper columnists and comedy panel show regulars exchanging witticisms (ie slagging off common people) about #MBFGW and XFactor, or discussing the exact Pantone card code of Claudia Winkleman’s face.

#53 The Midlife Manual

With The Midlife Manual due for publication on 2 September (‘Don’t turn 40 without it!’), my co-author and I are now obliged to start blogging, tweeting, facebooking, and no doubt stumbling, digging and didgeridoing by way of trying to raise its profile enough to encourage someone to buy it.

As we are continuously being told: ‘no one buys books any more’. In fact my co-writer was made redundant from his position of Books Editor of a leading listings magazine for precisely this reason, though strangely (and perhaps illegally?) I notice they have since employed a new ‘books editor’ suggesting that even if people don’t buy books, they still want to read them. Just as people no longer want to pay for music, but they will always want to listen to it.

Sadly we are no Radiohead and can’t afford to offer our creative output for download at a nominal 1p (plus we happen to like the physicality of a book), so the socially networked marketing campaign must begin.