Sunday, May 13, 2012

Book Marketing for Nitwits: More Twitter-2

Step 4:  Start Tweeting

I'd always been a plain vanilla tweeter. I sent messages with links to my blog posts. I occasionally commented on other people's posts. I'd even added a few hashtags, which I hoped would make my tweets easy to search, kind of like keywords. But an online marketing book I've been reading listed more advanced tweeting advice and acronyms, including: "MT," "via," and "h/t" for letting followers know that you're cribbing someone else's tweet.

While I was contemplating these new acronyms and advanced tweeting techniques, I received a Twitter alert that a published novelist whom I'd never heard of wanted to follow me.

Twitter pay dirt!

The novelist had over 100,000 followers. I sent him a note asking how he got so many followers and did they buy any books. "Don't know, don't know," he said. Obviously, he was holding out on me.

The secret must be in his tweets, after all, he was a published novelist and I was an unemployed writer. But his tweets looked like those of everyone else, like the lyrics from a tired Beatles's song:

8:00 a.m. "got up, crawled out of bed"
8:12 a.m. "ran a comb across the two hairs on my head."
8:31 a.m. "and looking up, I recalled I had no job.
8:47 a.m. "stumbled downstairs and had a beer."
9:30 a.m. "back in bed in seconds flat."
10:00 a.m. "mother knocked on my door, and I went into a dream."

After reading the published author's recent tweets, I returned to a contemplative state:

Do people really read this crap?

Do I really want to write this crap?

But at a recent writing conference, the experts insisted that Twitter was the best tool for finding new readers, so I'm going to give it another week. (I'll do anything to avoid working on my novel.)

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