Getting the most from Twitter with an underwear model

 

One constant problem for authors trying to promote their books is to work out what is effective. You have only so much time in which to write, promote your work, and to live whatever passes as your normal life. This time has to be managed properly to get the most out of it.

So how does Twitter fit within your timetable?

I have no hard figures, but I’ve put together some observations which I can back with some numbers. Firstly Twitter is not some magic wand. Just having more people seeing tweets about your book doesn’t necessarily increase your chance of selling.

A couple of years back, purely by chance, one of my books managed to trigger some sort of ‘bot-alert’ and was picked up by five people who tweeted to their followers to buy it. Checking up on those five people they were all Americans, and if their photographs were anything to go by, they were people my late Mother might have described as ‘underwear models.’ Interspersed amongst their tweets about their lives, things they’d heard etc were tweets suggesting their followers might find a particular thing worth buying on Amazon. Anybody clicking on the link and buying would of course buy through an Amazon affiliate link.

Over a period of a couple of days my book was tweeted a couple of times to 250,000 people in the USA. In that week and the week that followed I sold one book in the USA. Sheer volume of followers is meaningless.

Over the last few years I’ve come across a number of businesses who claim to help you promote your book. This they do by tweeting about it to their many followers, claimed to be enthusiastic readers.

I’ve never used their services but I’ve monitored their effectiveness by watching the books they’re promoting on Twitter. Each book on Amazon that has any sales has an ‘Amazon Bestsellers Rank’. Crudely put, when somebody buys a copy the book goes up in Rank, (say from 300,000 to 200,000) and when nobody is buying copies the book slips slowly back down the ranking again. So I watched the Amazon Bestsellers Rank of books these companies were promoting, and used my own books as a control. Frankly their much vaunted Twitter promotion had no meaningful effect, the books being promoted slipped slowly down the rankings at the same speed as mine did when I wasn’t promoting.

Then look at your own Twitter page, examine your followers carefully. One thing Twitter does is suggest people who appear to be similar to you and who it suggests you might like to follow. Unfortunately for aspiring authors with books to promote, the people Twitter most commonly suggests appear to be aspiring authors with books to promote. Whilst writers do read, my experience is that writing eats into their reading time and they’re hardly the best market.

 

So how do you promote on Twitter?

I have talked to a number of people who have no interest in promoting books but who have vibrant Twitter pages and up to a thousand followers.

• The first thing they do is post almost constantly. During every waking hour they’ll send at least one tweet, something funny, witty, or at least something that is interesting. Effectively they almost live on the phone, checking it regularly. Given that I only ever access my Twitter account on this desktop machine, by the time I think to look at it, an endless stream of babble has scrolled past since the last time I looked at it. Fourteen tweets I’ve not looked at since I started this article.

• The second thing these people do is to ostentatiously not sell things. One commented that when she did send out a couple of tweets about a friend’s new book, she lost two hundred followers. We might have joined Twitter to sell, but very few people join Twitter to be sold to.

 

So how do we do it then?

Like all social media, you can only get out of it what you put into it. You have to create a community around you that you can talk to. But you’ve got to listen and respond to people who respond to your tweets.

 

• Do the simple things first. If you have a blog or a Facebook page you can set up the systems to that they automatically post to Twitter whenever you post anything on them. Hopefully this allows you to get interesting content out there and people are drawn to you. All without having to waste time doing something.

 

• Live on your phone. If something happens, somebody says something, tweet it. I wouldn’t recommend you sink to the level of tweeting photographs of your meals, unless there is something newsworthy about them, but if the barista cracked a joke as they served you coffee, tweet it. The aim is to get people following and enjoying your tweets. Then when you slip in one along the lines of, “Really chuffed, got a new review for my latest book” with an Amazon link, it’s a natural thing.

 

• Respond to your followers. Engage them in banter. If one of your followers says something witty, profound, or newsworthy, like it and retweet it. Don’t be afraid of promoting somebody else. It helps people realise you’re not some self-absorbed ego-manic, but a real person who is happy to help somebody else.

 

All this can be done without knowing anything about the mystery that is hashtags, taking part in wider discussions and getting involved in the trending debates. I openly confess to being in two minds about these. Yes posting a tweet in a discussion which ten or twenty thousand people are following might get you some more followers who fall under the enchantment of your wit. On the other hand it could get you involved in a flame-war or lose you some of your existing followers who never realised that you were a misguided idiot who held bizarre opinions on the EU referendum.

 

Finally, remember people follow you because it’s fun. They have fun reading your posts. Ideally you will have fun posting your posts. You’re trying to create an atmosphere where these people think of you as fun and interesting and might well feel that your books could also be fun and interesting. If you’re not enjoying doing it, frankly, don’t do it. Life is too short.

The Essential Thai Holiday Guide

Obviously I frequent strange and exotic places. It comes with the territory. Not everybody has dangled their feet in the foaming waters of the Clogger Beck, or watched the tide scour the bank away at Plumpton. But there you are. Some of us have it and some of us don’t.

Still, I was walking home and there, in the middle of nowhere, lying at the edge of the road, where the tarmac meets the grass verge, was ‘The Essential Thai Holiday Guide.’ I confess to being a little bemused. Round here people throw many things out of their cars. McDonald’s drinks cups, Kentucky Fried Chicken packs, pizza cases, pregnant cats, garden waste, builders rubble, and in one case, a full three piece suite just dumped in our lane.

Note when I say dumped in our lane, I mean exactly that. The lane is the width of a car and somebody had opened the back, dragged the three piece suite out and just left it, abandoned, blocking the road.

But this is the first holiday guide that I remember. Indeed I fell to pondering on the matter. Had somebody travelled here with their holiday guide, and finally realised that they weren’t in Thailand and hurled the guide out of the car window in frustration?
It’s an easy mistake to make; Barrow in Furness has so many things in common with Thailand, beautiful beaches, gloriously hot summers, lady-boy bars and beautiful, slim and exotic women. We even have boats pulled up on the beaches!

But why do you carry a guide to Thailand in your car? And why do you just finally sling it out of the window into the road?

And now it lies there, a parable in dead tree form. A metaphor for life, it initially held out almost infinite promise. But slowly and surely battered by life, the inexorable decay brought on by pounding wheels and driving rain it has moved slowly and surely from glorious dream to paper-mache road kill.

The fate of the small publisher.

The problem with the revolution in publishing is that many more people can become publishers, but should they?

 

The question that we have to ask is what can small publishers offer? We now have the technology that allows any author to produce an e-book and sell it through Amazon. With a little more technical know-how this can be extended to the rest of the electronic formats. With only slightly more know-how the author can organise print on demand and sell their own paperbacks.

So what is the publisher for?

Firstly some authors do want handholding through these technical bits so there is still a job to do there, but it is now very much a subsidiary one. Production also includes such things as editing, proof reading and providing covers. These services can be very expensive if done properly. It is a matter of some contention whether these costs should be carried by writer or publisher.

The second and most important job is selling the book. This involves such things as organising publicity, getting word out there, getting it in shops and in front of the reader.

There are two problems with this; one is that in the world as we know it, in all candour, nobody really knows the infallible route to success. (This includes Amazon and the big name publishing houses who are as in the dark as the rest of us.) Indeed, for all the endless stream of websites offering to pimp your book for you, it’s probably still true that word of mouth is the best seller. The other problem for the publisher is that in spite of what the author might hope, most publishers realise that the author has to do a lot of the work. The best the publisher can probably do is guide them so that they do the work in the areas where they get the best return on their efforts, and also perhaps open doors so the author can strut and fret their hour upon the stage to new and more influential audiences.

The downside of this is that all this costs money. You cannot publish a book for free and it’s probable that ninety percent of books most small publishers publish will lose them money.
Hence the small publisher is really somebody with a proper job that pays the rent, (and subsidises the business.) Some people do up old houses as a way of reducing themselves to exhausted penury, but running a small publishing business will probably achieve the same effect for less physical effort.

Obviously there is the hope that the small publisher will discover a writer whose sales put the company back in the black and help fund all those hopefuls who haven’t yet made it. This appears to be one of the popular ‘business models.’ I use the phrase ‘business model’ because it’s a little more flattering than the more accurate ‘delusion.’ The main problem with the model is the successful writer. No sooner do they become successful and prove they can sell books than a bigger company comes along, offers them money, and whisks them away from you. The small publisher is effectively left with the writers none of the bigger companies want.

 

Is there any way round this?

Specialist nonfiction might be a way forward. You’ve got a product which is easier to market, and the target audience is better known.

Another option would be to build on top of an existing enterprise. Somebody who has been successfully publishing roleplaying games could be able to sell fiction relevant to the games to the buyers of the games. Again, you’re selling to a target market who you know. Games Workshop with their associated ‘Black Library’ is perhaps one of the most successful versions of this.

 

There are probably other successful business models out there. But what you must remember is that whilst writing books can be anything from an art form to a type of therapy, publishing them has to be a business, because if the bills cannot be paid, the publisher cannot exist.

A short trip to Strasbourg

Must be well over twenty years ago now, might be twenty-five. I was sitting in a meeting (well actually I was probably chairing it, which is how I stayed awake) when one committee member suggested we have a trip to Strasbourg to the European Parliament.

There wasn’t a lot of interest until he explained it would be expenses paid. At this point we all perked up. He was a member of one of our three main political parties, and explained that the EU had a fund which paid out for EU citizens to visit the EU parliament. He pointed out that in our constituency (as in all the others he knew about) the three parties tended to ensure that they send a fair number of their members on this jamboree every year. He’d been twice.

So he contacted the appropriate EU office, sorted the paperwork and a bus load of us, members of a farmers’ training group with no political affiliation whatsoever, went on a jaunt. Actually I didn’t go, my lady wife gets horribly travel sick on buses and somebody had to stay at home to milk, so I sent my parents instead. Luxury coach from South Cumbria to Strasbourg and back, three nights in decent hotels, and when they arrived at the Parliament building they got their expenses paid to them in cash. It was a fixed rate and I think that by the time they got home, their trip had cost them about a tenner apiece; the EU had picked up the rest of the bill.

 

Now it seems other member states used this scheme a lot. Many used the EU money to ensure that every school child got to visit the European Parliament and have everything explained to them. They felt it helped make them feel part of the European Community. In this country it seemed to be largely hogged as a perk for party members.

Now I don’t know whether the EU still funds this stuff, but it did strike me that if our MPs want to think of reasons why the people of much of England and Wales felt that they got nothing out of the EU, that it was remote and meant nothing to them, then a fair proportion of the blame for that falls at their own door.