Authors Helping Authors Update
Last week I came up with the idea of authors collaborating (please read it before continuing - opens in a new window) to get as wide a reach as possible on Twitter by creating the @AuthorTeam account and inviting fellow writers to follow, which gave them automatic inclusion in the AHA list. People could then search for that list and find tweets to retweets.
However, it isn’t working out a planned. First of all, I open the list every day and I get the tweets for the latest follower going back a whole week, which means I have to keep the list open for some time while the timeline fills up with new tweets. As anyone who has been on Twitter for a while knows, leaving it open soon cripples the browser by sucking the system memory dry (or maybe that’s just my laptop). It has also been brought to my attention that the #AHA hashtag has been adopted by others not involved with the group (even though a search for #AHA brought back no results last week!)
Besides this, the list is being filled with tweets that are not book-related, and it can take some time to find anything worth retweeting to the author’s benefit. That’s the case now with just 100 followers, but imagine how it will be when there are 1000 followers, or even 10,000!
Therefore, I plan to implement something new, but I need your help. It has to be something that remains free but doesn’t take a lot of maintenance (otherwise I won’t get to finish Gray Redemption, the third in the Tom Gray trilogy). I will give you my idea, but it would be wonderful if others could chip in and suggest something that would make sharing relevant tweets an easy and rewarding experience. In the meantime I will continue to run the AHA list.
My suggestion is simply to have a new hashtag: #HYFA2, which stands for Help Your Fellow Author Too. If you have a book-related tweet which you want others to share, just add the #HYFA2 tag. I have done a search and found no matches, so it will be ours for the next few days at least! All you have to do is click one of these #HYFA2 tags in a tweet (and preferably click the wheel next to the search button and select Save Search - that way every time you click into the Search box this tag will appear) and then pop back every day to find similar authors willing to share.
I really want this to work for everyone’s benefit, so please, add your ideas below or send a DM to my @Jambalian account.
However, it isn’t working out a planned. First of all, I open the list every day and I get the tweets for the latest follower going back a whole week, which means I have to keep the list open for some time while the timeline fills up with new tweets. As anyone who has been on Twitter for a while knows, leaving it open soon cripples the browser by sucking the system memory dry (or maybe that’s just my laptop). It has also been brought to my attention that the #AHA hashtag has been adopted by others not involved with the group (even though a search for #AHA brought back no results last week!)
Besides this, the list is being filled with tweets that are not book-related, and it can take some time to find anything worth retweeting to the author’s benefit. That’s the case now with just 100 followers, but imagine how it will be when there are 1000 followers, or even 10,000!
Therefore, I plan to implement something new, but I need your help. It has to be something that remains free but doesn’t take a lot of maintenance (otherwise I won’t get to finish Gray Redemption, the third in the Tom Gray trilogy). I will give you my idea, but it would be wonderful if others could chip in and suggest something that would make sharing relevant tweets an easy and rewarding experience. In the meantime I will continue to run the AHA list.
My suggestion is simply to have a new hashtag: #HYFA2, which stands for Help Your Fellow Author Too. If you have a book-related tweet which you want others to share, just add the #HYFA2 tag. I have done a search and found no matches, so it will be ours for the next few days at least! All you have to do is click one of these #HYFA2 tags in a tweet (and preferably click the wheel next to the search button and select Save Search - that way every time you click into the Search box this tag will appear) and then pop back every day to find similar authors willing to share.
I really want this to work for everyone’s benefit, so please, add your ideas below or send a DM to my @Jambalian account.
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