But better late than never. I actually relaxed, played with our Lionel trains, and posted a few Odd Lots to Twitter, which I will gather into a Contra post later this week as time permits.<\/p>\n
One of those Odd Lots posts went viral.<\/p>\n
This has never happened to me before. I didn\u2019t join Twitter until 2014, and haven\u2019t used it as much as most users, especially the bluchecks, who more or less live there. I have better things to do than live my life on social media. I keep my Twitter account because every time I post a link to one of my books, I sell a few books. This doesn\u2019t happen on Facebook, probably because my Facebook audience is relatively static, and I\u2019ve sold about as many books to the people who read my Facebook wall as that static audience wants to buy. I\u2019m ok with that. Saturating an audience is a species of winning.<\/p>\n
Twitter is different. People who read something I post and like it can retweet (basically, repost) that tweet to their own followers, most of whom have never heard of me. If it catches their attention they can in turn retweet my original tweet to their own followers, and the chain reaction continues until it burns out.<\/p>\n
This is not a good thing if the chain reaction consists of a Twitter lynch mob. That usually happens with political tweets, which I rarely if ever post. The tweet that sparked a chain reaction this time had nothing to do with politics. It was about food: A team of University of Washington researchers scrutinized decades\u2019 worth of studies focusing on red meat consumption and its association with various illnesses<\/a>, like cancer, heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. What they found was (a little) startling: The correlation between red meat and cancer, heart disease, and diabetes was down in the noise. There was no correlation with stroke. None<\/em>.<\/p>\n Their conclusion violated all kinds of conventional wisdom, which warmed my heart. I have some sort of genetic aversion to conventional wisdom, most of which is deliberately designed by those in power. I\u2019d seen some research showing the meat-disease connection to be false. This time, people at a reputable institution nailed it for all time.<\/p>\n And it took off like an F-14. Before the dust settled last night, that one tweet got 823 likes, 295 retweets, and 16 comments, many of which I answered, spawning still more comments. Come this morning I had 21 more followers than I had before I posted the meat-bomb tweet.<\/p>\n No other tweet of mine has every done a tenth as well.<\/p>\n There were some grumblers and at least one troll, who claims that he lost weight on a high-carb diet\u2014and stated that all books saying carbs make you fat have been debunked. They haven\u2019t, obviously, but I\u2019m letting him be him. Maybe he\u2019s a metabolic outlier. It\u2019s ok. I don\u2019t block people unless they attack me, and politely challenging a tweet I post is not an attack.<\/p>\n I have no idea why that particular link started a chain reaction. I don\u2019t really care. It\u2019s how I build an audience for my books, and to a lesser extent, for Contra. It\u2019ll be very interesting to see if it ever happens again.<\/p>\n _\u2026_ _\u2026_<\/p>\n Yesterday was Public Domain Day. This year everything published in 1927 went into the public domain. The big fish in that pond is (finally!) Sherlock Holmes. The last Holmes story was published in 1927. So now the Conan Doyle estate can pack up their tent and go home. They certainly got their money\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n What else is now free as in, well, free? It\u2019s a decent list:<\/p>\n _\u2026_ _\u2026_<\/p>\n\n