There has been a great deal of discussion about Twitter recently especially in regard to promotion. Joe Konrath made some very interesting points on his blog here and I tweeted the link because I felt it was well worth reading…then a new tweep came back...
@liz_fenwick Breaking Joe's rules by tweeting you but thanks for highlighting the post. Really thought provoking.
My reply
@juliastagg true but i don't tweet for publicity but for friendship and sanity...writing is a lonely business and twitter is company
This is really the point of twitter for me because the more I learn about the world of publicity and books the more I know that my efforts in the PR area will sell very few books. My activity on twitter which is not PR motivated will sell a few more, but not enough to call it a promotion tool. Lately there has been a few excellent blogs about twitter and over promotion…Nicola Morgan for one here. And if you are on Twitter you will know of a few author who are shouting about their books all the time – in one form or another and it’s a turn off even the ones I know in person. I can’t bear it.
However twitter is wonderful and it does promote books, but it’s not straight forward. I have bought many books on the recommendation of one of my twitter friends because they loved it. I trusted them and their judgement and it hasn’t sent me to a bad book yet. And I know friends have bought books on my recommendation. Let me say that again. My friends have bought on my recommendation…not on my retweet of someone else’s recommendation. A retweet can give an author or a book name recognition…but Joe Smith’s tweet that A Dark Night was the best book ever doesn’t carry any weight with me because I don’t know Joe Smith from Adam. However if Julie Cohen tells me a book kept her reading into the small hours…well I know it’s a good book.
So now to my point... Twitter for me is my community. It’s my colleagues and friends at the coffee machine. Most of my ‘work’ day is spent alone. I live in an imaginary world and wonderful though it is I need people, distraction and the brilliant procrastination.
Twitter is the place that I go to share news…I can’t call DH in the middle of the day to say I’m dancing round the dining room table because a book club has chosen my book for their summer read…so I tell twitter. I’m sure twitter thinks I’m absolutely mad and I am, but it’s wonderful to jump in a share and be a part of other people’s lives…from the exciting to frankly dull, but it’s real.
Now some would say that tweeting about being chosen by a book club is promotion and it is…but it’s not going to make anyone else go out and buy it, it’s not saying go and buy my book, but it does increase name recognition…
I have been tweeting with Colette Caddle for a while. She is a lovely person or is on Twitter. So one day browsing in a bookshop here in Dubai faced with thousands of titles and one jumped out at me. Yup, it was one of Colette's...and I bought it, but it wasn't until I was home that evening and on Twitter that I realized I knew her...name recognition in action....
I have to come clean…I, in an indirect way, ‘got’ my agent on twitter. Heaven forbid that I pitched to her on twitter…that is instant death. But we became twitter friends which led to meeting in person and drinking wine friends and of course shoe friends…So when I felt my book was ready, really ready, I pitched the proper way (letter, synopsis, and three chapters) but because of the friendship I didn’t languish on the slush pile….(it also helped that 3 other agents received the same submission at the same time and were interested...a little competition is a motivator)
At the recent RNA meeting there was an industry panel and I heard through the grapevine that Waterstones Publisher Relationship Manager, Cathy Rentzenbrink aka @cathyreadsbooks, held up a proof copy of The Cornish House when asked… “What lifts your heart when a book lands on your desk?”…why did she do this…according to my sources the Cornish theme and twitter…
So moral of the story…twitter works but not as many would have us believe….Are you on twitter? Why?
