Update on the Day I Went Viral

Remember this?

Best final line of any book I’ve read for a while. pic.twitter.com/xtbKLxHrxY

— Jonathan Pinnock (@jonpinnock) March 12, 2018

Four days on from the original tweet and the crazy bandwagon is running out of steam. It passed 6000 retweets a couple of mornings ago just after breakfast, but by that point it was already slowing to a trickle and since then I’ve actually been able to check my mentions without getting caught in the crossfire.

What have I learnt from this?

First of all, I still have no idea what makes a tweet go viral, but I have a bit of an idea about what prepares a tweet for being picked up. I think what was right about this one was that it was concise and on point, and also on a subject that people have strong feelings about. I also feel (perhaps controversially) that if I’d been sensible and added a link to where anyone could go and buy the book, it wouldn’t have taken off in such a way. There was a rhythm to the quoted text (and, if you’ll forgive me, my comment) that would have been disrupted if I’d done that. Or perhaps that’s just the poet in me trying to justify his existence.

Ultimately, however, it was dependent on people with celebrity status (a) reading it and (b) bothering to run with it, and that’s the part that was completely outside anyone’s control.

Still, even though I left the purchase details off the original tweet, the exposure did help sell a few books:

i can see a peak of about 100+ Kindle sales that I think are basically from this