Also on the OP there an interesting article here by Lizzie Chantree (romance writer) on how she grows her follower list https://lizziechantree.com/2018/02/26/growing-your-twitter-followers/ I agree with everything she says with an addendum to point 4 that I don't unfollow those who haven't followed me back if they have interesting stuff to say
I would have thought that the follower would have to do something pretty bad to unfollow, besides if you have a lot of followers going through the whole lot would be a chore. Going back to mailing lists I too have never bought a book through a mailing list. I mostly just go to Amazon, like the look of something, check the stars, and try it. Or I hear about it from somewhere online. Did that with Ben Aaronovitch's books and had six books to enjoy. I haven't heard much about mailing lists until now.
Thing is when you get to a certain number of followers (it used to be 2k, I think it might be 5k now) twitter puts a ratio on so you can only follow x:1 follow/followers ... no one knows exactly what the algorithm is and it probably changes anyway. Therefore if you have a lot of followers you have to be more careful about unfollowing accounts that you aren't interested in and didn't follow you back - you get software that can make it a lot easier as Lizzie mentions. This also means that if you get a follow from one of the big accounts (like say Stephen King) you need to earn it - e.g follow back, and retweet their stuff. You also have to be careful about following and unfollowing in bulk in general - if you regularly follow then unfollow as soon as the accounts have followed you back for example, twitter will flag it as spammy behaviour .... to much of that and they'll block your account (its shitty behaviour anyway )
Yes, you can have as many Twitter accounts as you want to. Each only requires a different e-mail address and name. I have two accounts - one in my name, and the other is the name of one of my blogs.
Cheers, thought so - its important to note that facebook isnt like that, while you can physically create multiple accounts they'll be pissed if they catch you. on fb its one account, multiple pages for different books or genres or whatever
talking of mailing lists Joanna Penn on lists https://www.thecreativepenn.com/how-to-build-an-email-list/ https://www.thecreativepenn.com/grow-fiction-email-list-subscribers/ Nick Stephenson who she mentions in the latter link is also well worth listening to - he a marketter turned author and really knows his shit
On twitter another thing that just occurred to me - Lists. If you are following more than a hundred or so people the tweets you really want to see (and retweet, reply to etc) can get lost A list is basically a selection of people who you want to pick out - when you click on the list you see only their tweets. I uses lists to curate groups as well so i have one for respected indie authors or experts, one for fiction authors i'm interested in, one for cover designers, editors etc i want to keep track of, one for exhibitions and events and like that. You can make lists public so anyone can see them, or keep them private.
Yes, that's what I hear. One big block in the marketing building, anyway. I need to start a thread about that.
It's funny you should write that because I once did have two separate accounts, they never did mention it to me. I got rid of the other one now anyway because it got confusing. Oddly I still have two, the other one is kind of different and based on art but is still connected to the first. So you could say that I once had three.
Its a violation of their terms of use - but they probably don't care that much if you aren't getting much traffic... its not however worth the risk in building an author platform because you could just get shut down when traffic starts building up. You can have as many pages as you want within reason, but they are all supposed to link off one log in
That's what I've heard from the marketing experts. I've bitten my tongue more than once on politics because I want my writing to appeal to readers from all points of the political spectrum. Though with what I'm written about political issues in my WIP, I'm likely to alienate folks from all perspectives. Oh well. The betas were ok with it.
Not really. Not anymore, unless you're a proven money maker. These days, even the trads expect their authors to fund their own book signings, organize theirr own blog tours, and bring to the table evidence that they already have followings (e.g., email lists). But anyway, this writing gig is a business, and time has to be put into it. Getting back to the OP, the question is how to make Twitter an efficient and effective use of our time. Me, I have to study how @big soft moose grew his following so quickly. I joined Twitter about the same time and I can hardly break 70.
I think partly I was lucky in that I was already interacting with Joanna on her podcast, blog etc and she was one of my first followers which gave me a degree of social proof ( I suspect a lot of my early follows were people who clicked to see who she was following recently then followed too - I also got a couple of by the by mentions on her podcast (in the updates bit) which helped - I saw spikes after each mention. Other than that - I'd say: 1) follow more people - 166 f to 70 fl isnt a bad ratio for starting out but you need to follow more not just to get back follows but to get yourself out there... don't follow randomly, look at the pages of some people you respect and see who they are following. Don't restrict this to writers in your genre - i'm following a lot of romance, erotica, history, sci fi and fantasy people as well as people in the action adventure thriller area where i write (also block any scammy sucky followers you get - they are generally the ones with random emails that don't match their screen names and pictures of scantily clad members of the opposite sex .... or ones with spammy names like viagra today.... a) you don't want them clogging up your feed, b) they'll dm you which is annoying, and c) having them in your followers looks bad to people considering following you. ) - lastly don't follow masses at once, follow say 10 or 20 a day. 2) tweet/retweet more often you are averaging less than a tweet a day (use a scheduler like hootsuite or tweet deck if you don't have time to do it manually) 3) interact with people more especially those with larger followings if you tweet (not DM) to Joanna , or Jenna Moreci, or Sarah Painter, or Jeff Goins or Paul Teague (lots of others) they'll generally interact with you which gives social proof to their followers that you are someone they should pay attention to, too. This isn't worth trying with the big big people like Stephen King or Lee Child either they arent running their own accounts, or if they are they re too busy to respond. 4) Hash tags - you are using a lot of hash tags but a lot of them are quite random. Try to use trending hashtags ( look on the bar on the right for the top ten , or see what others are using) , one I use a lot are #amwriting , #monday motivation, (and the other weekday ones) #craft hour #creative hour #futurism. Don't be too obscure in trying to shoe horn a link to your work in but if you can do. 5) Pictures and graphics - a lot of your tweets are words only, try to use pictures more - unsplash for the photos, canva to make the graphic, both are free 6) get Frances Caballo's free book twitter just for writers and follow her advice ..... shes a good one to follow @cabballofrances
I've found out about almost every single book I've bought in the past two years from Twitter. I follow favorite authors, review blogs, other writers (who will often recommend books they've recently enjoyed), and publishers in my preferred genre. I guess maybe if I found an author that I knew wasn't on Twitter and didn't want to miss out on new releases I might sign up for a newsletter, but I haven't run across any of those so far. If I utilized Facebook as much as Twitter I'd probably follow there instead or as well, but I've come to hate FB with a passion for personal reasons and I spend as little time there as possible.
All this time later, and I just saw this. Summer's coming, and I may have more time to take it to heart and apply it.
On point 2 above. Buffer pisses all over hoot suite for ease of use, the only thing is you only get to schedule ten at a time unless you pay for the upgrade.
