my work and something less mercenary: talking about stories I’d read and loved, sharing snippets about my life in the Yukon, joking around with people who cared about the same thing — nonfiction storytelling — that I did. When I finally worked up the nerve to pitch a small front-of-book piece to an editor at a major U.S. magazine for the first time, he replied: “I enjoy your Twitter! But this pitch seems like small potatoes, frankly. Got any feature ideas?”


Why it worked I feel uncomfortable, sometimes, when I talk about how I used


Twitter to help launch my feature-writing career. It feels so calcu- lated, so cold, when I explain it in such nakedly strategic terms. But the truth is, it worked because it wasn’t pure strategy — it was nat- ural for me to reach out to like-minded folks on social media and nerd out with them over our shared obsessions. Sure, I looked up editors’ names on magazine mastheads and then followed them on Twitter in hopes of writing for them some- day. But when I built relationships with those editors through years


That’s the key to making social media work for you as a freelancer: Above all, you have to be yourself.


of tweeted conversations, it was because of our mutual interests, our shared sense of humor. It wasn’t a process that felt forced or fake. I think that’s the key to making social media work for you as a freelancer: Above all, you have to be yourself, whether your medium of choice is Twit- ter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat,


YouTube or, uh, Medium. We’re writers for a reason, and if we let them, our personality and our wit and our sense of the world will come through in our posts to social media. The beauty of a platform like Twitter is its accessibility: On


Twitter, it doesn’t matter where you went to school, the internships you did or didn’t get accepted to, where you live or which media parties you get invited to. The only limiting factor is your own will- ingness and ability to put yourself out there, and believe that people will like what they see.


Eva Holland is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada's


Yukon Territory. Her work has appeared in Outside, Pacific Stan- dard, Smithsonian, Grantland, The Walrus, and many other publi- cations in print and online. Find her on Twitter @evaholland.


Eva Holland tests out a snow shelter known as a ‘quinzee.’ She helped construct it last March as part of a wilderness survival/bushcraft course she took on assignment for the regional Canadian magazine, Up Here.


Photo: Courtesy Eva Holland 19 SEJournal Fall 2016


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