Is Twitter a Waste of Time?

How does an indie writer like Dracie Chan become a best-selling author? According to the Wall Street Journal, her only book, 'The Mill River Recluse’ has sold over 400,000 copies since it was first published on Amazon in May 2011 (less than a year ago!)



Hoping to pick up a few tips, I thought I would look at what Ms. Chan has done to promote her book. When I found her on Twitter @DarcieChan (easy to find), I was amazed to see that as of 14 April 2012, she had only 307 followers, was following 11 people and had made just 189 tweets! Obviously Twitter has not been a factor in her success. However, does this mean that I’ve been wasting my time tweeting and following on Twitter?



Admittedly, I have probably wasted some time on Twitter, probably quite a lot of time if I’m honest and I’m going to try and be more self-disciplined in future. However, everything I’ve read about book promotion has said that social networking sites such as Twitter are a vital tool. Personally I would agree, but not because I have made a lot of direct sales as a result of it (and there are quite a few authors out there who are always tweeting, but have extremely low book sales). There are many best-selling authors like Catherine Bybee and John Locke who are very active Twitter users. However, they don’t use twitter to sell their books, they use it to share news and connect with readers and other writers. 



For me Twitter is a great way to:

Meet other writers
Talk to readers
Find out what other people are doing e.g. what they’re reading and what they’re writing at the moment
Share ideas with other people
Tell people about my latest news, such as great book reviews
Let people know about interesting blog posts from my blog and others (I always notice an increase in page views on my blog after a tweet about a post)
Let people know about great books written by other authors. One way to do this is to go to their book’s Amazon page, click the ‘Like’ button under the title and then click on the Twitter icon in the pop-up box that appears.
Do I also tweet about my own books? Yes, especially to get word out about a promotion, such as the promotional price I currently have for The Royal Sheikh (75% off!) and I do it in the hope that one of my followers might retweet my book tweet to their followers and perhaps one of those followers will decide to buy it.



What do other people think? Is Twitter a useful tool for authors? Why? Why not? (And by the way, I'm at @KatherynLane)