BY AUTHOR AARON SIKES
My last Sound-off Saturday was about Facebook and why I left it, both personally and professionally. This week, I’d like to get a discussion going around the use of Twitter, a form of social media I still use and find quite helpful to advancing my writing career.
I’m going to hit on four major points here, beginning with caveats of the What Not to Do variety. I’ll follow up with my thoughts about how best to employ those 140-character instantiations of yourself that Twitter allows.
Before we get going, this one is a bit on the long side. You may recall that I find Porter Anderson’s Ether posts somewhat inspiring, and that is for reasons of both depth and breadth. Stay with me though; I promise this one will be worth your time.
Contents:
Billboarding vs. Communicating
Twitter is not your billboard.
So don’t use it like one! You’ve seen those tweets, and you’ve ignored them like the twaddling noise they are. So why would you do the same thing to your followers?
An author I met at a genre convention admonished everyone in earshot to follow a 9:1 ratio when tweeting. For every billboard tweet, make sure you’ve got at least nine tweets that amount to information you believe your followers want to have or could benefit from. The 90/10 rule was a safe one to follow, she argued, because people know you’re trying to make a living. They’ll forgive a little billboarding as long as you don’t do that and nothing else.
So, I looked at her feed the other day. About 75% billboarding. Nearly every tweet included a link to buy, download for free, or read an excerpt from her writing on her blog, which ended with a link to buy the rest of the story.
Unfollowed.
Your followers are not following you because they want to know what you’re selling. Nobody is on Twitter to find the next book they want to read and wouldn’t have known about unless they had seen it on Twitter! Retweeted by your followers!
At its best, advertising lets people know things exist for them to buy. At its worst, advertising encourages people to buy things using time-tested psychological ploys, ruses, outright deceptions, and the like; one might be tempted to call it manipulation.
Shooting out one tweet to say “I have a book for sale!” fits nicely into the former category. It doesn’t do any harm to celebrate your successes and triumphs with a little “Hey, look what I did!”
Once.
It boils down to this. Using social media to billboard is a crass perversion of the reach that social media allows. That reach extends to potentially millions of individual human beings, each of whom has a life that is uniquely hers or his to live, and none of them want to look at the “On Sale Now!” sign that you’ve pasted in front of their eyeballs with your billboarding tweets and status updates.
Twitter is a real-time news source. That was its purpose at launch. Sure, you can tweet like mad about the Amanda Palmer concert you went to; people do it and she retweets it. That’s her community and her way of using Twitter. Few who follow AFP do so without truly grokking the phenomenon that is her way of using social media, and they are right there with her.
Will Amanda Palmer’s strategy work for an author? Doubtful. Not even if that author is Amanda Palmer’s husband, a guy named Gaiman, wrote a comic book once. He tweets about his books when they go on special deals, when they launch, and when he’s signed a few in secret and left them in a bookstore somewhere (okay, that’s a perfect use of Twitter by Neil Gaiman, and I wish he would do it in my town, no complaints here).
But the billboarding?
Useless. Even for Neil Gaiman. He doesn’t need to let us know more than once that he’s got a book coming out. Heck, we’re his readers. We know, Mr. Gaiman. We know and we can’t wait!
Those tweets are probably required by his publisher, and it certainly isn’t doing his reputation any harm. His announcements about releases and sales of his work won’t get him unfollowed (I don’t recall them getting retweeted either), but he’s not really in the collecting followers game, so even if he were unfollowed by hundreds at one go, would it matter? Probably not, though his publisher might raise an eyebrow in his direction.
Now, I know what you’re saying. Neil Gaiman doesn’t need people to retweet about his books being “out now,” because he’s already successful beyond belief. And he can tweet whatever he likes and get away with it. But as a new author, I/you/we can’t afford that luxury.
Nonsense, and this brings me to the next point I wanted to make.
Jordan Stratford, now there’s a guy who knows what Twitter is for. This is an author who had one Steampunk fiction title, quite a bit of film and educational writing, and contributions to The Steampunk Bible all in circulation before launching his now Geektastitcally Nerdgendary Kickstarter that landed him the deal of the century. So, the guy’s doing okay, writing up a storm to satisfy that Kickstarter promise, and showing up at nearly every major genre convention from Vancouver down to San Diego.
What’s he tweet about? How often? Take a look at his feed to get an idea. On any given day, you’ll see a fair representation of what Jordan’s Twitter feed looks like as a rule. Pictures of him and his family doing things he and his family do. Pictures of places he’s visiting, as he is visiting them. All of which amount to What Jordan Values Most.
He’ll also tweet political commentary, religious commentary, advice, praise for others and recognition of their successes and triumphs. And he’ll join the occasional argument (though it’s been awhile since I’ve seen him tweet by Queensbury rules).
Now, again, we’ve got a celebrity here. A big name in the game, so he can afford to do this, right? And the numbers don’t matter for him only because he has enough of them now.
Really, Tweeps? Really?
How many followers is enough? And why is that number the crucial metric? What do you expect those followers to do for you? Be honest now, and ask yourself, why do I place so much importance on the number of followers I have or how many people my followers bring closer to me by one less degree?
The reach of social media has great potential, indeed. But are you still secretly hoping in your greedy little heart of hearts that when you have an announcement about a book coming out that it will magically appear in all of those potential feeds and you will suddenly have a queue of readers lining up to place orders on Amazon in advance of your release date, thereby settling all your financial problems with one handy 140-character sized payload?
Translation: Do you really believe that the reach of social media can be equated with overnight or even just much faster than traditional paths to success?
Hmmm?
Your followers are not going to act as barkers for your one author carny show, and you should be ashamed if you hoped they would. I know I am. Using social media with an emphasis on short-term success is ludicrous.
Social media is about being social, about building relationships. Its use as part of a larger branding and platform building strategy should emphasize the long-term benefits of those relationships, not what they can potentially provide in the short term.
One back-pedal, if you’ll allow it. If you’re going to share someone else’s big news about a book release, do them one better and write a review first, then link to the review. You’ve just done two important things. First, you’ve shared your friend’s big news. Second, by linking to your review, you’ve (most likely) brought the potential customer in the door by sending them to Amazon or whichever retailer’s site your review is on.
As I’ve always argued whenever the discussion rotates around to focus on Social Media for Authors, the best way to ensure your use of social media remains consistent, genuine, and, most importantly, helpful to your effort at becoming a successful writer (note I did not say ‘celebrity,’ nor ‘star,’ ‘smash hit,’ or ‘the literary equivalent of the guy upstairs’), the best way to make it as a writer using social media is to remember the Bard’s advice by way of the Dane:
“This above all: To thine own self be true.”
When using social media as an author with hopes for a future as a successful writer making a living off of your wordsmithing, treat your followers and friends as you would people in the same room as you. If Facebook is a digital college campus (it’s original form when launched), do you really want to be seen as the person walking around the quad and student union wearing a sandwich board?
And if Twitter is an enormous cocktail party (as described by Jane Friedman), then do you want to be seen as the person walking around the room loudly contributing nothing to the conversation but “Hey, look what I’m selling?”
People use Twitter much the way they use Facebook, organically and with no real intent to find things to buy. They do use it to find out what’s going on at that moment. But for shopping? No dice, pal. Try the joint down the street; name starts with Amazon.
Twitter and the Users of Intention
Once I decided to be honest with myself about how I use social media, I quickly realized I had a problem. Godot was out there, wandering around as always. And he wasn’t going to get anywhere near me. Either I step up and act with intention online, or I let social media overtake my writing career, squirreling away my mental energy down wormholes (or rabbit holes) around the Internet and the never ending climb up the hill pushing this big rock called ROI. Was that Sisyphus I just passed up?
So, let’s get intentional with Twitter.
Twitter allows 140 characters. Everyone knows this. So, if you want to win at Twitter, be certain your tweet is contained, in its entirety, in 140 characters or fewer. That means I can read your whole thought and do not have to click through a dodgy looking link to maybe see what it is you’re talking about. And that’s if I haven’t passed over your half-thought to read something someone else posted clearly and concisely just above or below you.
If you use auto-posting software like Hoot Suite, or have your Twitter and Facebook feeds linked, be sure you know what’s going up next to that picture of your face. You are using a profile picture that is recognizably you, right? Do a trial run with all auto-posting mechanisms you plan to use and determine if the ones you’ve chosen are going to work for you (i.e., not work against you by truncating your thoughts).
Use bit.ly to shrink your tweets down to size and save space. Some abbreviations are acceptable, but do not devolve into butchering the language for brevity’s sake. Better that you append a tweet with the recognized 1/2 and then follow with your full thought in the next one.
Politics, Religion, and Sex. By all means, address, discuss, chant, trumpet, blare, flag wave, do what you like. Just know that the controversial tweet you feel passionately about may lose you followers. It may also gain you a lot more than you knew possible when you suddenly get retweeted by people who feel exactly as you do and find your pithy commentary so succinctly captures the truth that they’d rather retweet your thoughts than come up with their own version. Yes, that happens.
It’s a cocktail party, and everyone is in the room. Sometimes the conversation in your corner gets dull. Fine. Go find your people by letting your followers know what you think about the latest political scandal (we never run out of those and never will) or the latest court decision, or the latest ‘insert controversial topic of your choice’.
Caveat Tweetor
A word of caution to end with here. Twitter is populated by, for the most part, 18-29 year olds, split roughly down the middle between men and women.
Be wary of tweets that will position you as the missing stair. Social media isn’t forgiving. This is the Internet, folks. It’s forever, and public shame happens here. You, as an author working to build yourself into a brand, or at least a successful writing career, do have something to lose by mouthing off like an idiot with offensive bigotry and the like.
Of particular interest to the SFF community, of which The X is a part, is the recent blow up and continuing dialogue surrounding sexism in the larger genre community (SFF cons, publishing, etc). Educate yourself about what views are out there in circulation before you go off on a rant. There’s also this from the writers at BookRiot (Two Writers Who Are Killing it at Twitter), to help guide your approach to Twitter.
So, I’m at it again, fellow X readers and writers. Did I hit or miss this time? What has your experience been with Twittter? How do you determine whom to follow or unfollow (or block)?
AJ Sikes is an author of speculative fiction, leaning towards the weirder and darker side of life. He and his wife, Belinda Sikes, penned “His Frozen Heart”, an origin tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, which appears in Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology from Xchyler Publishing. Visit AJ Sikes online at http://www.ajsikes.com, or on Twitter @SikesAaron.
WARNING: The X policy does not allow for dissemination of not-suitable-for-work or offensive content in its blogs. For the links to these articles, follow @SikesAaron on Twitter.