So, this post might look familiar to those of you who’ve been through the blog at my old website. I decided to move this post over to this site because I feel it has some good information in it.
Over the past few months, I’ve learned quite a bit about marketing over various social media platforms, Twitter especially. The network of writers and readers available on this site is too grand to be ignored! I’ve gained almost a thousand followers by following a set of specific daily activities on Twitter since Dead by Morning’s launch in May, and I wanted to share some tips and pointers.
1. Hashtags!
I bet all of you are probably as sick to death as me at hearing about hashtags, but it’s true. This is the best way for people with common interests to find one another.
Here’s a few popular hashtags for writers:
#amwriting, #writerslife, #writerproblems, #amediting
(Note, the #amwriting hashtag can also be mixed with a genre to connect even better with other writers/readers. For example #amwritinghorror, a personal favorite of mine).
2. Daily writing events.
Twitter has a lot of attention and hashtags set aside for writers to find one another and share lines from their current WIP.
Have you heard of the hashtags
#musemon
#2bittues
#1linewed
#thurds
#ThruLineThurs
#Friday5th
#FictFri
#SlapDashSat
#SunWIP
and a variety of others? They’re all geared toward writers. Most of these have a theme that can easily be found with a quick search on Twitter. What these hashtags do is encourage writers to share a line or two of their current WIP with other writers.
This is a fantastic way to network!
3. Supporting one another in writing endeavors!
That one might be obvious, but sadly, it’s often underutilized. People often pin something important on their Twitter pages so the best way to show support for another writer is to share this Tweet! It shows them you care, and they may be so inclined as to return the favor.
4. Talk about books you’ve read or are currently reading.
The biggest problem for writers, I think, is to control your excitement about your project. People think it’s fantastic that you’re writing a book, but only tweeting about it may push people away and even lose you followers. The idea is to put a balance of promotional tweets and other things. Readers want to see you as an actual human, not just a load of self-promotion. Tweet about things you’re up to, what you’re currently reading, what you like to do.
Think about it like this, would you be as big of a fan of your favorite author if you knew little to nothing about them and all they did on social media was blast their books? Probably not.
Sharing information about books you like may help readers and writers connect with you. Of course, there’s a hashtag for that too:
#amreading, #MustRead, #FridayReads
All of these can help you connect with other readers.
5. Create a fan Twitter page of your favorite character.
Having a second account to tweet things from is actually a strategy used by many major movie production companies to help garner attention to specific upcoming products. When you being to build a fanbase, your readers may think it’s fun to poke at your character. You can have them like things they’re interested in, tweet about what they’re doing, and connect on-level with readers. This is an especially good promotion technique for books in a series since the Twitter can be a way to mediate interest in the series between book launches. Tweeting between the fan page and your own can also be an interesting and engaging way to spread information on upcoming events, signings, and things of that nature.
That’s all the major things that I’ve done on Twitter lately. Of course giving the occasional shout outs to friends and big supporters helps you as well.
I hope this was informative to everyone who reads it! Thank you for taking some time out of your day to visit my blog.
Hope the rest of your day is awesome!
Oh, P.S.
It’d be awesome if you followed me on Twitter!
Author Kayla Krantz 