Twitter woes

I now have a Twitter account but it’s not going very well. My difficulty is that anything I want to say seems to require more than the allowed space, so since signing up I’ve produced only three or four tweets. But now I have another problem. Recently I’ve been notified of two cheering tweets that speak well of past books of mine – one of my philosophical fantasy adventure ‘The Society of Others’, the other of my teen love story ‘Rich and Mad’. Neither of them seem to me to be much read these days, so I was delighted. But my attempt to reply has not been a success. I’ve found my replies in my timeline of tweets, and they look as if I’m promoting my own work, rather than responding to a tweet. I just don’t understand how it works. What I do know is that as a reader of other people’s tweets, too many of them are self-promotional, and although I understand the need for that, it produces the wrong reaction in me. I don’t want to be hard-sold products on a chat medium. So I’m embarrassed to appear to be doing the same thing myself.