social media – N S Ford

Review of ‘Careless People’ by Sarah Wynn-Williams

nsford — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:39:00 +0000

Sarah Wynn-Williams talked her way into her dream job, working in international policy at Facebook. This award-winning book is about her time there, giving a brave and shocking insight to what goes on in the top levels of the company. I understand why she wanted to work there; it was obvious to her, if not to the managers, that Facebook was about to be a major revolution across the world, influencing politics in particular. Using her diplomatic skills, she wanted to help the company manage their responsibilities in an ethical way. It became clear that their decisions were causing a lot of damage and they did not seem to care. What I didn’t completely understand was why she stayed at Facebook for so long, once she discovered what kind of people she was working for and that she disagreed with the direction the company was going in. Perhaps she stayed that long to collect all the material for this book? She was sent into dangerous situations, in countries she couldn’t navigate, while pregnant. She was expected to work all hours. She organised meetings with heads of state, only for her bosses to be late, make faux pas, or not read the briefings. Her managers behaved inappropriately towards her and HR wouldn’t help. It was only when she became ill, that she says she considered leaving, but needed the health insurance.

I would have liked more about her early life. She’s from New Zealand and suffered a near-fatal shark attack aged 13. Aside from this chapter, the book focuses on her time at Facebook and not all of the content interested me, although I recognised its importance.

Published by Macmillan, 2025.

Where the skies are blue

nsford — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 08:00:08 +0000

Several months ago, I signed up to Bluesky, the social networking platform. I did nothing with it, until yesterday, when I decided to start making a proper effort on it. My cunning plan is to find all my Twitter pals who have migrated there and to find some of the Instagram ones too. Then I will see what the situation is and consider whether to keep Twitter, I mean X. This was the first social media I joined, back in 2018. I started not knowing anybody and built my following up to around 4000. However, the platform has gone downhill since you-know-who took over. I have a lot more followers on there than any other place, although how many of these are (a) humans and (b) active users of the site, who knows. If you would like to follow me on Bluesky, I’m @nsfordwriter on there.

Blogging – why bother?

nsford — Fri, 27 May 2022 07:00:16 +0000

Quite often I see announcements from people who have decided to give up on blogging. Sometimes it’s because other things have become a priority and there is no time or inclination to keep the blog going. Other cases, however, cite lack of engagement as a reason to transfer from their own blog to, for example, other platforms where followers can be more easily gained or interacted with. Perhaps you may be wondering why bloggers continue their endeavours, while huge social media companies are pulling everyone in and causing a decline in small interactive websites. It’s really a question of what an individual hopes to gain from blogging.

First and foremost, I blog for myself. It can’t be denied that having an audience does help me to refine my writing style, but the blog is here for me to pour my thoughts and experiences into. Would I write so much if it was all in a private notebook or electronic file not intended to be shared online? I highly doubt it. As for engagement, I appreciate it when people comment on my blog posts, share them and are up for discussions. It’s true that engagement seems to be declining, for which there could be a variety of reasons. However, I get many visits to my blog and I gain more subscribers almost every day, so I know for sure that people are reading the blog and hopefully gaining knowledge or entertainment from the content.

I originally set up my blog in 2018, intending it to be a promotional tool for when I became a published author (finally achieving this purpose in 2021 with my first novel) but as a book fanatic I wanted a place to share my honest reviews and which I could personalise. Not limiting myself to book reviews, bookish features and updates on my literary career, I also blog about films, music, research and random things. I love having my own blog and I think there is something special about having one’s own little website which, although part of a community of blogs (WordPress) is not merely a snippet to be swiped on a social media app along with millions of others. I use social media to promote the blog, not the other way around. I fear that our attention spans in general are becoming shorter and that contemporary technology is to blame. Why read a thousand word blog post when you could scroll through video clips instead? Media everywhere is becoming increasingly audio-visual, making blocks of written text seem rather old-fashioned and not worth expending brain-power on. Or is that the appeal? Not everyone wants to watch and listen. They want to read the words on the page.

That’s all I’m saying about blogging for now. Now, back to the book reviewing…

The pros and cons of NetGalley

nsford — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 08:00:55 +0000

NetGalley is a website where reviewers can request advance copies of books. I have been a member for about two years. I’m no expert on NetGalley but I have enough experience to sum up the advantages and disadvantages of this resource.

Pros:

Access to new and upcoming titles for free, which allows you to read the latest work from some of your favourite authors, genres and publishers, as well as to discover new ones.
In my experience, most requests are likely to be approved by the publishers. After all, the more reviews they get, the better.
You can see what other reviewers thought of a book, which can help you decide whether to request it, and of course the reviews you write will help others decide in turn.
For every milestone, you get NetGalley ‘badges’ which you can display on your blog by copying and pasting the image code they give you.
There are lots of publishers on there. Many of them regularly update their titles, so if you check back every month or so, there will be something new and interesting.
Once a publisher has approved your request, it’s easy to download the title from your ‘shelf’ on your NetGalley profile. I find that it sometimes takes a few minutes to appear in my Kindle library.

Cons:

Many of the advance copies are uncorrected proofs. This means they can have a weird format, typos and missing text. It can make for an annoying reading experience.
If a publisher rejects your request, there is no reason given and it’s hard not to take it personally. I have only had three requests rejected so far.
There is nothing to stop you going on a request frenzy and ending up with too many books to review, all with publication dates close together.
You have to give a star rating when submitting a review. I don’t do star ratings on my blog as I find them problematic.
Some titles are there for you to browse but when you attempt to request them, you are told that they are not available in your country.
I seem to remember that it was a little confusing and time-consuming to join NetGalley and set up a profile. It was worthwhile, however.

Here are some of the best books I’ve read via NetGalley:

In Miniature by Simon Garfield

Critical by Matt Morgan

Who Did You Tell? by Lesley Kara

Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro and Cornelia Funke

Some I had mixed feelings about:

Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce

The Switch by Beth O’Leary

Five Days of Fog by Anna Freeman

And here are the only ones I thoroughly disliked:

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal

In summary, NetGalley is a very good source of new books for reviewers but self-restraint is required to avoid requesting more books than you can manage.

10 things I’ve learned about social media in 1 month

nsford — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 23:30:28 +0000

I joined Twitter on July 27th. The week after, I set up a WordPress blog. This was all relatively new to me and I’ve already learned a lot in a month…

There are so many friendly, kind, supportive people out there – including YOU, the reader! Willing to give advice, to support newbies and discuss random things, these folks make the internet a happy place.
Cats rule Twitter. Not really surprising, as they rule everywhere else. And why not?!
It’s easy to find and make connections with other social media users who have similar interests, such as book reviewing, writing, mental health awareness and… cats.
The laughing/crying emoji appears everywhere on Twitter. By the way, I knew emojis as ‘smileys’ or ’emoticons’ until recently.
Some people on social media are very popular and have thousands of followers. Assuming that each one of their followers is a real person, it’s incredible how the following has been built up.
Memes are often used in addition to, or instead of, written comments. I’ll play the GIF when it’s in a reply to me, but otherwise I’d rather read original thoughts. Just my preference…
It’s impossible to keep up with all the stuff constantly updating into my feeds. The more accounts I follow, the more content there is to catch up on. But it’s hopeless already, I’m certain to miss a lot of good content.
Email notifications for WordPress are useless. I can’t deal with all the mail generated by the blogs I follow. Instead I keep on top of it by checking my WP Reader once a day.
Twitter is good writing practice because it encourages people to be concise when expressing thoughts (unlike Facebook, where people can ramble and rant for longer).
Some people are putting pressure on themselves to gain a certain number of followers or views and to produce a certain amount of content. I don’t want to have targets like this, because then blogging will become a chore and it won’t be fun any more. The exception would be if I was making money from the blog and then of course I’d have deadlines.

I know there’s still a lot to learn. It’s been a brilliant first month of Tweeting and blogging. Roll on September!