Books by PM De Angelis Facebook page

I started this Facebook page back in 2012, but did not keep it updated at that time due to other activities. I have just relaunched it after a three-year hiatus. During that time, I published three poetry collections: Remnants of the Spirit World; One Hundred Haikus for Modern Workplaces; and Quantum Bloom, and am currently working on a new volume of poetry as well as a short story collection. Please check out the Facebook page; I promise to be a more active contributor than I have been previously. 

https://www.facebook.com/BooksbyPMDeAngelis/

Using social networks

I read an article the other day that indicated that Facebook's popularity was waning, especially among younger people. That doesn’t surprise me; what surprises me is that the level of interest in any social network is sustainable for more than five years, given the short attention spans we have developed for most things technological or IT-related. It’s the nature of the beast; something better is always going to come along eventually and supplant the king of the jungle. I suppose that’s the way it should be; at least that’s been the name of the game for as long as I can remember.

I use the social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and I use them for different purposes. I think most people might say the same. It’s a conscious decision on my part to keep them separate from each other. Facebook is my way of keeping in touch with friends and family in the USA, and to some extent, here in Europe. You’d be surprised at how difficult it’s become to get people who live only a town or two away from Oslo, together in one room for a social event. Planning an evening out with three or more people has become a major affair; it’s often easier to update each other on what’s going on via Facebook. So instead of writing five emails a week to friends, I update my status on Facebook several times per week, but not on a daily basis.  So Facebook is for personal use. I use Twitter for professional purposes; I follow most science-related sites; the list grows ever longer. I am now following sites that have to do with politics and government, and find them interesting as well. Not surprising perhaps, when you understand the importance of politics in the creation of policies for how science should be made understandable and relevant for the public (e.g. climate change, global warming, science education in schools, sustainable energy sources). When I started off using Twitter, I wasn’t sure what it might be good for, and I didn’t understand why people sang its praises. Now I know. It’s an amazing way of getting news as it happens. Science publishers like Nature and Science have discovered this; they need only post a short tweet as to what the new hot article is on their websites and in their journals and they’re guaranteed that interested readers will read their tweets and click on the relevant links. New scientific discoveries and interesting new articles spread like wildfire. So I use Twitter to stay updated on what is going on in my field, as well as in science generally. I even credit Twitter with getting me interested in astronomy. You need only follow NASA on Twitter (https://twitter.com/NASA) to understand why. If I had been better in math, I might have been an astronomer, the field is that interesting. Daily Science is another site I follow; you can find them here: https://twitter.com/DailyScienceUp. Guardian Science is another favorite; you can find them here: https://twitter.com/guardianscience. And if you’re interested in following me on Twitter, here is the link: https://twitter.com/paulamdeangelis.

Finally, LinkedIn; it doesn’t surprise me at all that potential employers/recruiters utilize this site frequently. I read an article the other day (courtesy of Twitter) that reported that LinkedIn was the social network that most recruiters use (http://www.livescience.com/29178-recruiters-find-job.html?cmpid=514645). What other platform provides CVs, references, and personal/professional interests for potential candidates for employment? Better yet, what other platform provides you with a candidate’s connections, that may be even more interesting (employable) than the actual candidate in question? This network, like Twitter, is reserved for my professional use, and I plan on keeping it that way. I am careful as to whom I include as a connection, as I want to build a network that can be valuable to me professionally. A nice touch is that your connections can write recommendations for you that are published on the site. Potential employers read such things. Your connections can also recommend specific skills, but I find this aspect less useful than an actual written recommendation.

How things have changed during the past ten years. In that sense, who knows what the next ten years will bring? One thing is certain; there is a new social network or platform just waiting in the wings, whether you like it or not, or whether the current social networks like it or not. That’s the nature of the beast.

Forays into the world of social media promotion

I am slowly becoming more social media-savvy. It’s taken a while—I joined Facebook in June 2008, rather late compared to many of my American friends, and it’s hard to believe that I will be coming up on four years of social interactions that have changed my life in a very positive way for the most part. Joining Facebook pushed me over a wall that had been of my own making; it was easier to stand on the side of not knowing, of not reaching out, of not sharing, of being skeptical to all of it. But I’ve realized that as long as I can maintain some semblance of control over what, when and how I post, I can be a part of the digital age and actually be happy. I’ve also joined Twitter, mostly in a professional context—I enjoy tweeting about science and the little tidbits that I come across during my day, since I follow a lot of scientific journals and newspapers that write about science. It is an amazing daily ride through a huge world of other twitterers who seem to love what they’re doing. I don’t post each day; I simply don’t have the time for it. And as you have probably surmised, I have less time these days for blogging as A New Yorker in Oslo because my work life has changed (yet again) and now I am busy with new responsibilities that are actually quite welcome. I plan to keep on blogging, but I may not post as often as I used to. I hope you will keep reading in spite of the change.

In my more recent consultant work, I have discovered the power of Facebook ads to promote business pages, events, products, and whatever else one might dream of. For my own creative projects, I’ve created two Facebook ads, one to promote my book Blindsided—Recognizing and Dealing with Passive Aggressive Leadership in the Workplace; the other to promote my new page Books by Paula M De Angelis (https://www.facebook.com/BooksbyPMDeAngelis; you would have to be a Facebook member to connect to and ‘like’ the page). The ads appear on the sidebar of Facebook sites. You can choose your budget—25 dollars a day for ten days, or 500 dollars lifetime budget for one particular ad campaign. It’s a pretty amazing way to promote what you want to promote. You can choose your target audience. In my case, I target English-speaking countries, and in both cases, my target audience on Facebook was approximately 175,000,000 people over the age of 18. Daunting? Oh my God, yes. I have no idea if these ads will increase sales of my books. But whatever happens, it was worth learning about this promotion possibility. I also use press releases to announce the publication of new books, and they are also quite effective at getting the message out there. The point is that being an indie author means that you do all of the promotion work yourself. If a publishing house had released your book, they would be doing this work for you. I don’t mind doing the legwork myself. Again, I guess because I am a bit of a control freak, I like knowing what is going on and having some control over how fast it all proceeds. I’ll keep you posted on the eventual outcomes—how many people actually look at the ads, and if sales of my books increase.

You know you grew up in the Tarrytowns during the 1960s/1970s if......

I grew up in Tarrytown New York during the 1960s and 70s. I remember a lot of different things from my childhood and teenage life in that small town, and have already talked about some of them in this blog. It is funny what one remembers, and also what one forgets. When I write about my growing up there, I do so from a distance of a good number of years, in other words, I’ve gained perspective, and it is mostly the good memories that remain now. But it was not always so easy to grow up in a small town, especially if you wanted or needed a certain amount of anonymity to survive mentally or emotionally or both. But somehow as you get older, the anonymity is no longer so important. It becomes more important that people know the real you. One’s teenage years are about trying on many different coats to see if one of them fits. If you find one that fits, you hang onto it for a little while because it feels comfortable. The coat can be a clique of friends where you fit in, or doing well in school and winning praise from your teachers and parents, or being part of sports’ teams, or all of those things. Many of these coats are tried on in the context of small town life, where it is safe, even though you don’t really know that at the time. Looking back now, the ‘smallness’ of our lives then is appealing, but when we were young, some of us couldn’t wait to get out into the big world. In those intervening years, much has happened, both to those who stayed put and to those who traveled out. We now have the chance to know what happened in the lives of many of those people, thanks to Facebook. Facebook has closed the gap of those intervening years in a way that nothing else has before or will again in quite the same way.  

 ‘You know you grew up in the Tarrytowns during the 1960s/1970s if’ is a Facebook group that now has close to 670 members.  It is a fairly active group in the sense that there are new posts published regularly, not necessarily daily, but it doesn’t matter. I joined the group a couple of years ago, right after I joined Facebook. I don’t remember how I found the group but I'm glad I did. I know some of the members personally, others I’ve heard of, but most I have never met. What is appealing about the group is what they remember about the Tarrytowns--Tarrytown and North Tarrytown (renamed Sleepy Hollow in 1996); their posts reflect this. Some of the more recent posts have informed about the deaths of two Tarrytown women many people knew and loved, while others wonder about what happened to this or that person. The uploaded photos are priceless, literally a walk down memory lane as well as a walk into town history. Some of the photos are probably worth some money, taken as they were during the early 1960s and 70s. I think especially of the photos of the big fire on Main Street that destroyed a major portion of the building that faces onto Broadway, or of the old General Motors plant on the Hudson River in North Tarrytown. Some of the photos of the old Tarrytown Music Hall are just beautiful. I spent many a Friday night there at the movies. I saw one photo recently on the site of a long trailer truck packed with new cars--a standard sight in Tarrytown at that time--hauling new cars up from the General Motors factory, out onto Broadway where the road would take them out into the world at large to be sold elsewhere. Broadway was (and still is) the main thoroughfare through both towns. When I was a teenager you could visit the little hole-in-the-wall bookstore near Main Street, the Murray Franklin stationery store for cards and gifts, small stores like the Great California Earthquake with its penchant for hippie clothing, larger clothing stores like Genungs, the Baskin & Robbins ice cream store (with the great-tasting pink bubblegum ice cream with actual pieces of bubblegum—talk about chewing and trying not to swallow the gum at the same time as the ice cream, as well as the heavenly mint chocolate chip ice cream), the Pastry Chef (with its memorable cakes—lemon sponge, Boston cream pie, marzipan—all of which remind me of special family events that we always ended up celebrating with a cake of some kind from the Pastry Chef; Jean and I were talking about this recently when I was in NY), several funeral homes, supermarkets and finally the majestic Warner library with its late 19th century bronze sculpted front door http://www.warnerlibrary.org/node/888. I haven’t seen a more beautiful library building except possibly the New York Public Library in Manhattan. It is interesting to see from the newer photos posted on the site how the town has changed since then—Sleepy Hollow high school has undergone extensive renovations, gasoline stations have been replaced by diners, Patriot’s Park is now the site of the Farmer’s Market, the old Woolworth store is now a gourmet food store, supermarket fronts have been spruced up—just to name a few changes within the last decade or so. The riverfront areas of both towns are more or less unrecognizable compared to what I remember from my childhood, except for the train station in Tarrytown and of course the Tappan Zee bridge, which is unchanged and which remains the landmark that identifies that one has finally reached one’s destination on the east side of the river and the bridge—Tarrytown. The riverfront areas have been renovated and built up with apartment building complexes, among other things, and this I know just from my driving around the areas this past summer. I’ve written about these changes in some of my earlier blog posts.

I love looking at many of the old photos of the Tarrytowns on the Tarrytown Facebook site. Recently I came across a paperback book that took me even further back than the 1960s and 70s. It is called Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow (Images of America), and is by and large a collection of black and white photographs from the late 1800s up until 1947. The Introduction to the book states “Not intended to be a comprehensive history, this volume offers selected images of our community from 1609 (artistic renderings of specific areas) until 1947”. The book was written and put together by The Historical Society Inc. serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, and published by Arcadia Publishing. It can be purchased through different sellers via Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Tarrytown-Sleepy-Hollow-Images-America/dp/075240881X. It is not an expensive book; I don’t think I paid more than 15 dollars for it. But it is a must-have book if you are a history buff or if you are interested in rediscovering the town you grew up in. I wanted to rediscover Tarrytown, and in doing so I got in touch with those parts of myself that remember and appreciate this beautiful historic Hudson River town.