The Captain's Blog proudly presents: Tips on using Twitter to promote your book!
How to promote yourself as an author on Twitter…
I was asked recently by a good friend and fellow author on Twitter (hi Carol!) if I had any tips for promoting books on Twitter without pissing people off. No matter what you do, you are always bound to annoy someone. There is a very fine line between being purely social and being annoying by posting too many adverts, yes you spammers out there, listen up!
You can’t please all the people all of the time. Some people see Twitter as a purely social arena and some as a business opportunity. I see myself as being somewhere in-between the two. I hope that I’ve found the right balance and what follows is how I’ve done it. Some of this you will already know. Some of it will seem obvious. But it’s surprising how many people on Twitter don’t realise how to promote themselves effectively.
I am an author of the #MilitarySCI_FI #JosiahTrenchard novellas. I self publish on Amazon. I use Twitter as a way of meeting like minded people, for meeting potential readers, and for promoting my books. The rules below are methods I have learned or picked up from other people that seem to work for me. You may know better. I generally tweet from an iPad, so your screen controls may look different to mine, but the processes involved should be the same for everyone.
Rule 1: Twitter is a social network, treat it as such.
If you just tweet adverts at people 24/7, they will switch off and ignore or even un-follow you. The whole point of Twitter for an author is to be social and interesting while subtly trying to get potential customers interested in your product. You don’t want to be the Twitter equivalent of those morons who sidle up to you while you’re shopping in an electrical store and try to sell you a credit card now do you?
I try to tweet a few nice things to people, join into conversations and then throw in the odd advert in randomly between. I find that if you send out ten adverts in one go, or worse still use automatic software (grrr), people will scroll past your pages of tweets and simply ignore them. People are generally not stupid, they know if you are using software and will generally get bored of you really quickly if you send “contributed tweets”.
Interact. Be funny, be subtle, be whatever you like but be INVOLVED! I have met some lovely people on Twitter who are not even remotely interested in my books, but I still talk to them regularly because Twitter is a social network first and an advertising platform second.
Rule 2: Little and often.
If you just go onto Twitter once a day and throw out fifty tweets in an hour, most will be ignored. Go on every couple of hours through the day if you can and send one or two tweets. If you can’t manage that go on first thing in the morning and last thing at night, maybe lunch time too. Apart from hitting more people, you’ll catch users in other countries who have just woken up or are about to go to bed. I’m in the UK. Most of America is asleep when I tweet. If I’m on very early in the morning or late at night I will catch people at either end of their day in the USA. I’ve even been known to tweet in the middle of the night when I have to get up to pee! This is happening more often these days as middle age rolls on, but at least I get the occasional RT in return for my nocturnal wanderings.
Rule 3: Tweet a picture.
THIS IS IMPORTANT! A lot of people who are trying to promote themselves, particularly books, don’t use pictures and I really don’t know why? People generally prefer to work visually. I specifically look for tweets with pictures because I like to see what’s going on instead of reading through reams and reams of text. But this isn’t the main reason to use pictures.
My latest Twitter promotional picture...
If someone sees that you’ve RT’d them and they want to reciprocate, they’ll usually go to your home page and hit “View more Tweets”. If they then have to scroll through four screens of your RT’s of other people before they can find one tweet that is actually yours, they’ll usually get bored and move on. However, tweet a picture and they can immediately see your latest tweet in the pictures section of your Twitter home page and RT you more easily. Simples!
Please make sure your pictures are of good quality. There’s nothing worse than opening up the picture of an author’s book cover on an iPad screen to find it is blurry and pixelated. Authors, use pictures of your book covers. Don’t just rely on a link. If your cover is eye catching, people will stop to look. Think of Twitter like a book store full of other titles. Yours has to stand out!
Rule 4: Don’t just RT.
If all you do is RT other people and never tweet yourself, it becomes very frustrating for people trying to find a tweet of yours to RT back. Every time you have done eight to ten RT’s, throw in a promo tweet of your own or even just something social. This saves someone who wants to RT you back having to scroll through pages and pages of other people’s tweets to find yours. Use this in combination with rule three and you’ll make your tweets easier to find.
Rule 5: Always RT back. Always follow back.
This may seem simple, but if you want to get more followers and reach as many prospective customers as possible, always RT someone who has RT’d you. Do this one thing and you’ll see your re-tweets increase massively. Always follow back, unless you really don’t like the account that has followed you. Periodically check your followers to make sure they are still following and un-follow those who aren’t. Justunfollow.com is very useful for this and can be used unobtrusively.
Rule 6: Compose your tweets to look visually interesting.
If you bunch all your tweets together in a jumble of text they
are harder to read. #WTF #ThisMakesNoSense #Jumbled
But if you… Space them out!
They look much more inviting! :)
#NiceAndClear
Just
Don’t
Take
The
Piss!
Or
You
Will
Annoy
People!!!!!!!!
Rule 7: Use #hashtags.
Find out what hashtags other people are using that are promoting similar products to yours and use them. Don’t make up your own apart from one or two that might be specific to your product. Use several hashtags for each tweet. Don’t make up silly ones that no-one else is using, it’s a waste of time. Google what is trending today (there are several websites that do this) and if there’s a hashtag that’s appropriate, use it!
For example, for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary there was a hashtag #SaveTheDay which lots of Whovians were using. I was promoting a blog interview about my books which are #SCI_FI and therefore I used the tag line “Need a hero to #SaveTheDay ?” in my promos to catch #DoctorWho fans who were idly trawling through that Twitter hashtag and might be interested in my books.
Rule 8: Seek out your own kind.
I am a self proclaimed sci-fi nerd. My books are aimed at people just like me. So therefore I go out of my way to be nice to other nerds I find along the way, RT them and Follow back. I get involved in conversations about the latest Doctor Who episode or the new Star Trek film. This way I have built up a community of like-minded friends who are more likely to help me out when I have a promotion running. The science fiction fans on Twitter are awesome and I have made many good friends who I talk to regularly (waves)…
In order to make my tweets more appealing to “my own kind” I use phrases and quotes from sci-fi TV and films that they will recognise. People tune into these phrases and are more likely to look at your tweet. Similarly I use tag lines akin to “If you like #StarTrek then you might like my books!” This is perfectly legal and comparing your product to something that people already know is going to make them more likely to read your tweet.
Again, act sensibly. Don’t just find science fiction fans and tweet adverts for your space opera book directly at them, or worse, send a DM! I hate DM’s from people that I don’t know. If you receive a DM with a link, don’t click on it as a lot of them are spam and they’re trying to hack your account.
Rule 9: Use your “Favourites” as a tweet store.
If you are running a promotion, you will probably want to have several different tweets to send out during the course of the day. Not only is this important to keep it interesting, but Twitter will not let you send out the same tweet twice in a row unless at least a few of the characters are different.
Here’s what to do:
1) Compose your first promo tweet.
2) Send it
3) Favourite / Star it.
4) Repeat this process at least three to five times making each tweet slightly different.
5) You can now safely go back to your first tweet in your favourites list and copy and paste it into a brand new tweet.
6) All you should now have to do is delete your @ name from the beginning of the tweet (for example @JonGardener) and then press send.
This method means that you can easily send the same tweets again and again throughout the day without continually having to re-type them, as long as you work methodically through the list and don’t send them too often.
Rule 10: Be friendly; your friends are your greatest allies.
This brings me right back to Rule 1. Twitter is a social network. If you treat it purely as an advertising tool, you will not get anywhere. Your Twitter friends that you make along the way are your greatest asset. If you have 1000 followers then your tweets may reach all of them, but more likely will only reach a small percentage.
If you have a friend who has 20,000 followers and they will happily re-tweet your promos, you’ve just massively increased your audience. I’m not saying actively seek out people with large followings either. Just keep track of who your buddies are by creating “Lists” and send them direct tweets when you have a promotion running asking them (nicely and politely) to RT your stuff. For this to work you MUST be prepared to do the same for them whenever they ask. If you are friendly and polite, people are usually all too happy to help.
Rule 11: Use an eye-catching avatar.
No I’m not talking about that awful film by James Cameron starring the Blue Meanies! Your avatar is the picture that appears in the left hand side of your tweet and on your Twitter home page. Don’t use the standard egg, you’re just not trying and you might as well be a damned spam-bot. Don’t use anything that is copyrighted either or you might get sued!
If you’re insistent upon using a picture of yourself, make the picture eye-catching. Wear a hat or a bright red scarf, do something unusual! (Stops and re-reads that last sentence…) Keep it clean though people. Your partner might like to see your naked glory, but we don’t!
Even better, design your own logo. Mine is a bright red evil eye. Everyone can see it stand out in a list of “head and shoulder” pictures and when I changed it recently for Mowvember, some people complained that I was harder to find and my RT rate dropped like a stone! Most people know how to manipulate images on their computer these days. All I did was to take a picture of my own eye and crop it square. Then I changed the colour to bright red. If you can’t do it yourself then find a friend who can. Your avatar is the first thing that people look for when they’re scanning the list for your tweets. It’s vital to have a good one!
Rule 12: Connect, connect, connect.
Get a website. You can get a free one if you have a G-mail account. Have links on your website to what you’re trying to sell and a contacts page to other places people can find you, for example Goodreads, Pinterest, G-Mail, Amazon. Put the link to your website on your twitter home page and include it in tweets where appropriate. My website is a simple Google Sites one. It’s free, easy to design yourself and has my biog, contacts, links to my books and special treats for my readers that aren’t in the books. It has so much information on it that you simply can’t put onto Twitter alone. If you have a blog, link it up. If you have an Amazon author page, link it to twitter and a YouTube video trailer for your book. Link everything to everything else and make your web presence even bigger.
Rule 13: Treat this like any other job.
You are trying to sell books and make money. Therefore this is your job, not a hobby! I can’t emphasise this enough. If you want to make a success out of whatever you are promoting, you must treat it as you would any other job. Do the same thing at the same time each day and do it EVERY day!
I wake up and the first thing I do is RT anyone who has RT’d me overnight. Then I send out one or two promo tweets and maybe something like a good morning tweet. Then I go to the bathroom, get dressed, have breakfast, load the van (I’m a gardener). After all that I sit down at my PC and RT anyone that has RT’d my first morning’s tweets and then send out another couple of tweets.
Then I write for about an hour, every day without fail.
When it gets to 8:30am I check my tweets one last time, RT and throw out a couple more promos. Then I leave for work as a gardener. If I come home at lunch time, I RT people who have RT’d me, then (you guessed it) send out a couple of promos.
When I get home from work, the first thing I do is check Twitter and RT, then tweet. During the evening while my wife is watching “I’m a Z list celebrity, please humiliate me for as long as I get paid,” I RT and tweet. The last thing I do before I go to sleep is RT and then tweet.
Repeat each day…
This is a routine I try to stick to. It’s hard as I’m trying to become an author at the same time as being a gardener and doing the household chores. But if you don’t treat promoting yourself as if it was any other job, then you’re not going to succeed. Oh, and I write blogs too, when I can find the time…
Phew! That’s everything I can think of at the moment. Feel free to post comments on my blog or e-mail / Tweet me questions if you have any. You probably have some hints and tips yourself? The main thing is be social, be polite and have fun!
I wish you every success with your projects and I hope to see you around on Twitter.
Thanks for reading.
Jon.
I was asked recently by a good friend and fellow author on Twitter (hi Carol!) if I had any tips for promoting books on Twitter without pissing people off. No matter what you do, you are always bound to annoy someone. There is a very fine line between being purely social and being annoying by posting too many adverts, yes you spammers out there, listen up!
You can’t please all the people all of the time. Some people see Twitter as a purely social arena and some as a business opportunity. I see myself as being somewhere in-between the two. I hope that I’ve found the right balance and what follows is how I’ve done it. Some of this you will already know. Some of it will seem obvious. But it’s surprising how many people on Twitter don’t realise how to promote themselves effectively.
I am an author of the #MilitarySCI_FI #JosiahTrenchard novellas. I self publish on Amazon. I use Twitter as a way of meeting like minded people, for meeting potential readers, and for promoting my books. The rules below are methods I have learned or picked up from other people that seem to work for me. You may know better. I generally tweet from an iPad, so your screen controls may look different to mine, but the processes involved should be the same for everyone.
Rule 1: Twitter is a social network, treat it as such.
If you just tweet adverts at people 24/7, they will switch off and ignore or even un-follow you. The whole point of Twitter for an author is to be social and interesting while subtly trying to get potential customers interested in your product. You don’t want to be the Twitter equivalent of those morons who sidle up to you while you’re shopping in an electrical store and try to sell you a credit card now do you?
I try to tweet a few nice things to people, join into conversations and then throw in the odd advert in randomly between. I find that if you send out ten adverts in one go, or worse still use automatic software (grrr), people will scroll past your pages of tweets and simply ignore them. People are generally not stupid, they know if you are using software and will generally get bored of you really quickly if you send “contributed tweets”.
Interact. Be funny, be subtle, be whatever you like but be INVOLVED! I have met some lovely people on Twitter who are not even remotely interested in my books, but I still talk to them regularly because Twitter is a social network first and an advertising platform second.
Rule 2: Little and often.
If you just go onto Twitter once a day and throw out fifty tweets in an hour, most will be ignored. Go on every couple of hours through the day if you can and send one or two tweets. If you can’t manage that go on first thing in the morning and last thing at night, maybe lunch time too. Apart from hitting more people, you’ll catch users in other countries who have just woken up or are about to go to bed. I’m in the UK. Most of America is asleep when I tweet. If I’m on very early in the morning or late at night I will catch people at either end of their day in the USA. I’ve even been known to tweet in the middle of the night when I have to get up to pee! This is happening more often these days as middle age rolls on, but at least I get the occasional RT in return for my nocturnal wanderings.
Rule 3: Tweet a picture.
THIS IS IMPORTANT! A lot of people who are trying to promote themselves, particularly books, don’t use pictures and I really don’t know why? People generally prefer to work visually. I specifically look for tweets with pictures because I like to see what’s going on instead of reading through reams and reams of text. But this isn’t the main reason to use pictures.
My latest Twitter promotional picture...
If someone sees that you’ve RT’d them and they want to reciprocate, they’ll usually go to your home page and hit “View more Tweets”. If they then have to scroll through four screens of your RT’s of other people before they can find one tweet that is actually yours, they’ll usually get bored and move on. However, tweet a picture and they can immediately see your latest tweet in the pictures section of your Twitter home page and RT you more easily. Simples!
Please make sure your pictures are of good quality. There’s nothing worse than opening up the picture of an author’s book cover on an iPad screen to find it is blurry and pixelated. Authors, use pictures of your book covers. Don’t just rely on a link. If your cover is eye catching, people will stop to look. Think of Twitter like a book store full of other titles. Yours has to stand out!
Rule 4: Don’t just RT.
If all you do is RT other people and never tweet yourself, it becomes very frustrating for people trying to find a tweet of yours to RT back. Every time you have done eight to ten RT’s, throw in a promo tweet of your own or even just something social. This saves someone who wants to RT you back having to scroll through pages and pages of other people’s tweets to find yours. Use this in combination with rule three and you’ll make your tweets easier to find.
Rule 5: Always RT back. Always follow back.
This may seem simple, but if you want to get more followers and reach as many prospective customers as possible, always RT someone who has RT’d you. Do this one thing and you’ll see your re-tweets increase massively. Always follow back, unless you really don’t like the account that has followed you. Periodically check your followers to make sure they are still following and un-follow those who aren’t. Justunfollow.com is very useful for this and can be used unobtrusively.
Rule 6: Compose your tweets to look visually interesting.
If you bunch all your tweets together in a jumble of text they
are harder to read. #WTF #ThisMakesNoSense #Jumbled
But if you… Space them out!
They look much more inviting! :)
#NiceAndClear
Just
Don’t
Take
The
Piss!
Or
You
Will
Annoy
People!!!!!!!!
Rule 7: Use #hashtags.
Find out what hashtags other people are using that are promoting similar products to yours and use them. Don’t make up your own apart from one or two that might be specific to your product. Use several hashtags for each tweet. Don’t make up silly ones that no-one else is using, it’s a waste of time. Google what is trending today (there are several websites that do this) and if there’s a hashtag that’s appropriate, use it!
For example, for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary there was a hashtag #SaveTheDay which lots of Whovians were using. I was promoting a blog interview about my books which are #SCI_FI and therefore I used the tag line “Need a hero to #SaveTheDay ?” in my promos to catch #DoctorWho fans who were idly trawling through that Twitter hashtag and might be interested in my books.
Rule 8: Seek out your own kind.
I am a self proclaimed sci-fi nerd. My books are aimed at people just like me. So therefore I go out of my way to be nice to other nerds I find along the way, RT them and Follow back. I get involved in conversations about the latest Doctor Who episode or the new Star Trek film. This way I have built up a community of like-minded friends who are more likely to help me out when I have a promotion running. The science fiction fans on Twitter are awesome and I have made many good friends who I talk to regularly (waves)…
In order to make my tweets more appealing to “my own kind” I use phrases and quotes from sci-fi TV and films that they will recognise. People tune into these phrases and are more likely to look at your tweet. Similarly I use tag lines akin to “If you like #StarTrek then you might like my books!” This is perfectly legal and comparing your product to something that people already know is going to make them more likely to read your tweet.
Again, act sensibly. Don’t just find science fiction fans and tweet adverts for your space opera book directly at them, or worse, send a DM! I hate DM’s from people that I don’t know. If you receive a DM with a link, don’t click on it as a lot of them are spam and they’re trying to hack your account.
Rule 9: Use your “Favourites” as a tweet store.
If you are running a promotion, you will probably want to have several different tweets to send out during the course of the day. Not only is this important to keep it interesting, but Twitter will not let you send out the same tweet twice in a row unless at least a few of the characters are different.
Here’s what to do:
1) Compose your first promo tweet.
2) Send it
3) Favourite / Star it.
4) Repeat this process at least three to five times making each tweet slightly different.
5) You can now safely go back to your first tweet in your favourites list and copy and paste it into a brand new tweet.
6) All you should now have to do is delete your @ name from the beginning of the tweet (for example @JonGardener) and then press send.
This method means that you can easily send the same tweets again and again throughout the day without continually having to re-type them, as long as you work methodically through the list and don’t send them too often.
Rule 10: Be friendly; your friends are your greatest allies.
This brings me right back to Rule 1. Twitter is a social network. If you treat it purely as an advertising tool, you will not get anywhere. Your Twitter friends that you make along the way are your greatest asset. If you have 1000 followers then your tweets may reach all of them, but more likely will only reach a small percentage.
If you have a friend who has 20,000 followers and they will happily re-tweet your promos, you’ve just massively increased your audience. I’m not saying actively seek out people with large followings either. Just keep track of who your buddies are by creating “Lists” and send them direct tweets when you have a promotion running asking them (nicely and politely) to RT your stuff. For this to work you MUST be prepared to do the same for them whenever they ask. If you are friendly and polite, people are usually all too happy to help.
Rule 11: Use an eye-catching avatar.
No I’m not talking about that awful film by James Cameron starring the Blue Meanies! Your avatar is the picture that appears in the left hand side of your tweet and on your Twitter home page. Don’t use the standard egg, you’re just not trying and you might as well be a damned spam-bot. Don’t use anything that is copyrighted either or you might get sued!
If you’re insistent upon using a picture of yourself, make the picture eye-catching. Wear a hat or a bright red scarf, do something unusual! (Stops and re-reads that last sentence…) Keep it clean though people. Your partner might like to see your naked glory, but we don’t!
Even better, design your own logo. Mine is a bright red evil eye. Everyone can see it stand out in a list of “head and shoulder” pictures and when I changed it recently for Mowvember, some people complained that I was harder to find and my RT rate dropped like a stone! Most people know how to manipulate images on their computer these days. All I did was to take a picture of my own eye and crop it square. Then I changed the colour to bright red. If you can’t do it yourself then find a friend who can. Your avatar is the first thing that people look for when they’re scanning the list for your tweets. It’s vital to have a good one!
Rule 12: Connect, connect, connect.
Get a website. You can get a free one if you have a G-mail account. Have links on your website to what you’re trying to sell and a contacts page to other places people can find you, for example Goodreads, Pinterest, G-Mail, Amazon. Put the link to your website on your twitter home page and include it in tweets where appropriate. My website is a simple Google Sites one. It’s free, easy to design yourself and has my biog, contacts, links to my books and special treats for my readers that aren’t in the books. It has so much information on it that you simply can’t put onto Twitter alone. If you have a blog, link it up. If you have an Amazon author page, link it to twitter and a YouTube video trailer for your book. Link everything to everything else and make your web presence even bigger.
Rule 13: Treat this like any other job.
You are trying to sell books and make money. Therefore this is your job, not a hobby! I can’t emphasise this enough. If you want to make a success out of whatever you are promoting, you must treat it as you would any other job. Do the same thing at the same time each day and do it EVERY day!
I wake up and the first thing I do is RT anyone who has RT’d me overnight. Then I send out one or two promo tweets and maybe something like a good morning tweet. Then I go to the bathroom, get dressed, have breakfast, load the van (I’m a gardener). After all that I sit down at my PC and RT anyone that has RT’d my first morning’s tweets and then send out another couple of tweets.
Then I write for about an hour, every day without fail.
When it gets to 8:30am I check my tweets one last time, RT and throw out a couple more promos. Then I leave for work as a gardener. If I come home at lunch time, I RT people who have RT’d me, then (you guessed it) send out a couple of promos.
When I get home from work, the first thing I do is check Twitter and RT, then tweet. During the evening while my wife is watching “I’m a Z list celebrity, please humiliate me for as long as I get paid,” I RT and tweet. The last thing I do before I go to sleep is RT and then tweet.
Repeat each day…
This is a routine I try to stick to. It’s hard as I’m trying to become an author at the same time as being a gardener and doing the household chores. But if you don’t treat promoting yourself as if it was any other job, then you’re not going to succeed. Oh, and I write blogs too, when I can find the time…
Phew! That’s everything I can think of at the moment. Feel free to post comments on my blog or e-mail / Tweet me questions if you have any. You probably have some hints and tips yourself? The main thing is be social, be polite and have fun!
I wish you every success with your projects and I hope to see you around on Twitter.
Thanks for reading.
Jon.
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Thanks Jon!! Hope lots of other writers benefit from your wisdom!!
Really good info. As for favorites to save to edit/RT -- great. I also like using free Pluggio.com -- you can edit, RT, thank the RT'ers of a particular tweet, all with one click.
Great time management tips!
Hi Jongreat post, thanks
I agree with Rachel *Hi*, the favourites RT thing is a great idea.
I do think you need to be careful with the hashtag hi-jack thing though. #savetheday is innocuous enough, but jumping on something else can be a bit cheeky if not done nicely...
cheers
Mike
I think I'm proof of what Jon mentioned above.. I'm not a big sci-fi buff other than Star Trek Next Gen.. but he and I have been tweeting one another for a year or more and I always look for him to jump into anything I'm promoting of mine.. Jon.. this is one of your best blogs because it helps everyone see a clear picture of how best to use Twitter.. thanksChas Wells
This is a great blog, Jon, full of good advice for anyone who uses Twitter. I'm very impressed by the amount you get done by 8.30 in the morning! Thank you for all your support and I shall continue to RT you (day, night and morning it seems!)Jen x
Just wanted to add one thing, Jon - I disagree that an eye-catching picture is better than a photo of the person - I think a photo is ALWAYS best! Most people want to talk to a person, not a book cover. You can use the pictures as your header picture or your background, but part of 'author as a brand' of establishing your online presence is what you look like!
Jon,I'm a newcomer to Twitter and your advice is the best I've found anywhere. Thanks!
This is brilliant. Thank you so much. Great tips. Reassuring that I'm doing some things right but some learning points too. You're a star
Great post, Jon. Good advice for those new to Twitter and a refresher for the rest of us. Always enjoy our tweet chats!
Thanks Jon for this post - really helpful for me.
Hannah wrote: "Thanks Jon for this post - really helpful for me."Always glad to help Hannah!
Finally. I think I understand! Thanks.
I just know this is going to help a lot, and if it does, I will shout it from the rooftops!
Very glad to help. I'll be listening out! :D
Captain's Blog
Random thoughts from a science fiction author...
- Jonathon Fletcher's profile
- 95 followers
One thing I don't do is RT back everyone who Rts me. If I did, I'd never get time to write, and also half the people who RT me these days do it via app. The other day I looked at the followers of one of these. Nearly all of them were app users or what I call pointless follows - non English speaking, follower collectors, etc. So this profile RTing me is just an app RTing my info to people who will never see it. I think about 50% of writers are using autotweet, Roundteam or begware to do their RTs now, which means they are not USING Twitter at all, but just pumping out adverts. However, the good news is that if you don't RT them back they don't know, because they're never on the site!!!
You should post this again on Monday, and use the #MondayBlogs hashtag if you don't use it already, it's really good. My blog views went up tenfold when I started using it.