Using Twitter Better

For a long time, I resisted the Twitter. I'm not a big Facebook user, and I viewed Twitter as just a bite-sized Facebook with people yapping about their Starbucks order or asking for a goat for their imaginary farm. Besides, how can you say anything in 140 characters?

But I was wrong and I'm learning to love Twitter, or at least appreciate its usefulness. And, yes, if you're self-pubbing, you can't not use Twitter. It's invaluable in meeting new people, learning new things, and, yes, promoting yourself if done correctly.

That said, a lot of people are using Twitter poorly and annoying everyone while doing so. Paraphrasing Glinda the Good Witch, are you a good tweeter or a bad tweeter?

The site 1stwebdesigner.com has a great list to start you out on 10 totally uncool habits you may have fallen into.   I particularly dislike people who do mass follows and unfallows and who promote themselves mercilessly.

But What About Promotion?

Yes, Twitter is a great tool for promoting your work, but you don't want to be the guy with the poorly lettered sandwich board blocking the front door of the coffee shop accosting passersby and shouting at them. Use self-promotion smartly and sparingly. If you've got a new post on your blog, don't tweet about it non-stop for three hours. Instead, tweet a few times throughout the day with different hashtags. If you've got a coupon or  an announcement or a sale, make it a fun tweet, pique someone's interest with a tagline, change things up.

There's nothing wrong with self-promotion, but don't look like a selfish noob. Follow some other authors that you admire and see how they go about promoting themselves. You'll probably notice that all their tweets are not screaming "BUY MY BOOK," but instead they tweet links to other sites, news, or posts of interest. They make comments of encouragement or tell jokes. In short, they act like somebody you'd want to have a drink with instead of some sweaty guy pounding on your door with an armload of encyclopedias. The way to get people to buy into your promotion is to be interesting, informative, and friendly. 

But how do I get followers if I don't mass follow?

Everybody wants to have tons of followers, and there are lots of gadgets and widgets and websites that will automatically add followers and do all kinds of annoying things. And while it's an ego boost to see your follower list balloon, in the long run I don't think it helps you much. You want to follow people you're genuinely interested in, and you want followers who are genuinely interested in you, otherwise you're just tossing messages into bottles that no one's going to open. 

There's a strategy that you can use that's going to take time and effort, but in the end is going to make you much happier and serve your needs much better.

First find people. One way I find people is I look at the follow/followed by lists of people I admire or follow or who have a blog/service that I like and use. For instance, I love David Gaughran's blog and I follow him on Twitter. He's a swell writer and his blog is indispensable for self-publishers. So I'll look up who David follows on Twitter and who follows him. Now I've got a ready-made list to sift through for likely people to follow. You can also check out tweets by people you follow or admire and see who they're retweeting or what blog posts they're recommending.

Now comes the work part, the time-consuming part. Once you've got a list of likely people, check out their tweets. Are they interesting, informative, current? Or are they only about themselves or do they espouse some viewpoint (political or otherwise) that you detest? If you like a person's tweets, then visit their website, check out their books, check out their blog. If they interest you or you find their work useful or informative follow them.

If you're interested in having someone follow you back, give them a reason to. Sign up for their newsletter, become a friend on their blog, leave a comment on their blog, tweet about their blog or their book, or send them a direct message introducing yourself. Something like, "Hi. Just read your blog and really enjoyed the post about Twitter." 

Don't do this insincerely, because most people can smell insincerity a mile off. And you don't have to do the same thing for every person you follow. Don't manufacture something (like the thank-you letters you wrote as a kid) but try to be friendly or helpful or even snarky. I find snark works much better than insincerity. 

Set a number of followers you'd like to add per day or per week and work to make that goal. Remember, you're not just adding followers like trophies in a case, you're looking for people you have some connection with, whose stuff you enjoy, or you think might be interested in what you have to offer. I try to follow five new people every day I'm on Twitter (which is not every day). Today, I followed 7 people and six have followed me back. And it's not just about the follows, I found a really great blog that I enjoyed reading   --   http://brendangannon.net/   -- and I found a book I put on my Amazon wishlist for when I've plowed through the seven books on my nightstand and the five on my Kindle. 

So it's not a race or a storefront, it's a way to connect and find other people who are cool and worthwhile, and just might think you're cool too. 

Link of the Day

Okay, so it's shameless self-promotion, but, hey, it's my blog. The S/O has been working on setting up a new authors website -- which is still very much under construction -- but I'm setting up showcase pages that consist of a cover and a quick sample for each novel. The idea is to let the writing speak for itself without a lot of blurby stuff stepping all over it. So check out the bare bones prototype for Darker By Degree and, if you're so inclined, tell me what you think of the idea.

http://keriknutson.wordpress.com/darker-by-degree/

Bonus Content: Lagniappe Marketing

Down here in New Orleans, "lagniappe" means "a little something extra." I've been following a lot of interesting conversations recently on blogs, email groups, and forums about adding bonus content to your self-published books and stories.

For me, if I have a choice between a box of cereal and a box of cereal with a premium inside, I'll always pick the premium. I'll send in boxtops to get the decoder ring. People love getting something extra, they love being engaged.

Self-publishing gives you myriad ways to engage the reader through bonus content. There are so many possibilities: previews of other books, interviews, anecdotes, background about characters or setting, links to resources. Say you're writing a historical mystery. What better way to give the reader a little something extra than linking to resources about the era or the subject matter, a Flickr stream of photos, a list of other books they might enjoy?  How about an interview with your protagonist? How about an anecdote about your first flash of inspiration for the plot or the character? A scene that you cut, not because it was bad, but because it didn't quite fit with your pacing?

If you want to get really wild, you can go interactive: an Internet scavenger hunt, a treasure map, a contest. If you're clever and involved, the sky is really the limit.

How many times have you enjoyed a book and at the end wished it wasn't over or wanted to know what happened to a character or wanted to just keep that little bit of magic going?  How many times did you want to tell somebody else about the great book you just read or leave a note to the author?  You can provide that opportunity to your readers with every book or story you put out.

Bonus content serves three purposes: it engages your reader, it gives your reader a sense of greater value, and it gives you a chance to further market your work. At the very least, every one of your books should have an "About" or "Follow Me" section, where you can list your websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites. Make it easy for the reader to engage with you, to seek you out, to find your other work.

Practical Example: What am I doing? This week I'm publishing four short stories via Smashwords and Kindle. These aren't just thrown together to get them out, they're my four best short stories. Initially I'm going to give two away for free and price two at 99 cents, just to get a feel for how free stories affects pay stories. I have three goals: I want people to be able to get a feel for my writing for free, and I want to generate a buzz for the novels that will be coming out -- four full-length (over 325-page) novels over the next three months -- and I want people to follow me on Twitter and on my blogs.

So for each short story the package will include: The short story, a little "About the Story" lagniappe, a preview package of the next two novels (a cover, blurb, first chapter of each), and a page with all my personal "Follow Me" information.

Example: "Sticks Like Bones"  will include this lagniappe:

About the Story: Sticks Like Bones

This was written on spec for an anthology that folded before publication. I mention that because it’s the only story I’ve ever written where I wrote TO a concept instead of having an idea show up at the top of the cellar stairs demanding to be let out.

I find the French Quarter a fascinating place, almost like a slice of elsewhere that fell through a rip in the fabric of here. There is such a feeling of weight to it, but it’s always shedding itself, in brick dust and loose nails, bits of crumbling slate from roofs and flakes of paint. It’s a reminder that time exacts a price, that decay keeps running through everything even as we live our lives without paying it heed.

The places described in the story are a mix of the real and imagined. The oddest thing for me is that even though the French Quarter is a cleanly laid-out rectangle, I always get lost if I’m walking alone, almost as if the layout changes around me, like some multi-dimensional funhouse. Suffice to say, I no longer walk without a companion.

Following that, I'll give the cover for Running Red and this blurb:

Jesse Stone has been running the night roads for 150 years, preying on humanity for survival, but he still feels an ache from the empty place where his soul was torn away. Other vampires – an ex-SS soldier, a fanatical tent preacher, an Aztec biker – have been gathering an army for an assault on humanity. Now Jesse must lead a rag-tag band of humans against the others, in a last-ditch attempt to find redemption…


Look for Running Red, coming soon.

I'll follow that with the first chapter of Running Red and the preview package for Darker By Degree.
Then I'll finish it up with a "Follow Me" page that lists every place I can be found.

Easy-peasy. With a hour or so of extra work, hopefully I've given the reader that little something extra, I've piqued their interest, and I've given them further reason to seek me out.


What lagniappe can you give your readers?

Week One: Marketing Presence

We're winding down on the preliminaries here, the checklist of things you need to concern yourself with before launching into self-publishing, and we're to the area that I've seen people have the most reluctance to tackle: marketing yourself.

You've got a great book, you've proofread and edited it meticulously, you've got a stunning cover and fabulous formatting. None of that matters if no one knows it exists. Everything you've done up till this point has been to ensure that once a reader sees your book they'll pick it, devour it, and eagerly await your next masterpiece. But they have to see the book. They have to either seek it out or stumble across it. If you want to sit back and wait for readers to come astumbling, be my guest. You'll probably have quite a wait, especially since self-publishing is just starting to blossom and it's only going to get more crowded from this point forward.

Make no mistake, a critical part of your marketing is tied up in your cover, your blurb and description, and your search tags (more about all that at a later date), but you've also got so get your name out there. Think of the web as a giant writer's conference. It's time to shmooze and get connected, hang out in the bar, strike up a conversation, set up a table to display your wares.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard or read an author say, "But I don't have time for that!" and then show back up to ask, "How come nobody's buying my book?" I'd probably be able to pay for the new clutch I just put in my car. Get over it. I've got five kids (the youngest in kindergarten), a full-time freelancing business that takes a minimum of 40 hours a week, and a household to run. If I can find time to both write and do self-promotion, anybody can. The hope of course is that at some point in the future I'll quit the freelancing job and I'll be established enough that self-promotion will take far less time, but when you're starting out, you've got a mountain to climb.

Where to start up that sheer rock face? Forums, news groups, blogs, email groups. Read, familiarize yourself with what's out there. When you have something to contribute, post. Have a good  question? Ask it. Talk about yourself. Talk about yourself some more, but don't be obnoxious. Be a good web citizen and offer some value. Don't ask for favors unless you're willing to do some in return. Be polite. Be well-informed. Make friends. When the situation presents itself, join groups. Earn someone's respect. You need a network in the writing/publishing/reading community and you need to build it bit by bit.

You'll need an author's website. When people want to look you up, they'll need somewhere to go. You can go the fancy route and buy a domain and take the time to design (or have designed) a website. Or you can go the easier route and set up a site on WordPress or Blogger. (The pros, cons, and possibilities in another post).

It's a great idea to have a blog. It may be time-consuming and intimidating, but good grief, you're a writer. TALK! WRITE! Remember the three C's: Current, Cogent, Catchy. Blog regularly, blog something well-thought-out and interesting, and do it in a way that's eye-catching and invites people to add you to their RSS feed or bookmark your blog. If you feel it's too much to handle, form a group with friends and take turns. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it does need to have some passion.

Take advantage of social media. Have a Facebook page, or maybe a Facebook page for your book, series, or protagonist. Use Twitter. Set up your own little empire where you can get the word out and interact with readers and other writers.

These are all preliminary steps that you should take now. Soon you'll have to worry about sending out copies to reviewers, planning launch events, attending conferences, marketing materials, blog tours, and myriad other things you can do to market yourself. Before you get to that stage, you need to have a foundation online and in your local community. It takes time, and the time to start is long before you have a book to actually market.