Interact with your audience

I am not a talkative person.  Even at family gatherings I’ll just sit and listen to other conversations.  The reason I’m bringing this up in a writing blog, is that my quiet nature also applies to social media.  If someone leaves a comment on a tweet, I’ll probably spend a few minutes debating if I should reply.  And the vast majority of the time I don’t.  This can be an issue since one of the common pieces of advice given to writers on how to sell more books is to “interact with your audience.”

Even if I did interact with people, I don’t know where to begin interacting with my audience.  Over the years I’ve gone to several forums and I’ll find a topic like, “Science fiction authors looking for readers.” That’s perfect, I’ll think, and then I’ll see that there are 14,000 comments stretching back six years.  I’ll read the last thirty and see that there are just four people having a conversation about some random topic.  Well, I’ll start my own thread, I’ll think.  That way I’ll be in the conversation from the beginning.  So I’ll start a “Science fiction authors looking for readers,” and nobody comments on it.

Writing a compelling, coherent story is hard enough, but then you have to talk to people to sell it?  Argh.  Isn’t there an easier way?  I know there are “services” that will promote books, I just wish they had $5 Test Package to see if it would be worth it to get the $100 Basic Package.