I think it was almost a year ago, from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, in his Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, that I first got the recommendation that emerging authors use Twitter to reach more readers. Since then, Twitter usage has tripled, and even agents and 'legacy' (i.e., traditional) publishers are growing reluctant to work with new authors who don't use social media in general and Twitter in particular. But it was Jon F. Merz and his book How to Really Sell Ebooks that finally persuaded me to get on board.
I emitted my first tweet less than eight weeks ago, on 14 June, and I now have almost 700 followers, most of them added in the two weeks or so that I've been following Jon Merz's guidance. That number is modest if compared with the numbers following, say, Margaret Atwood (almost a quarter of a million) or Lady GaGa (almost 12.5 million), but it's 2.5 times my combined friends and fans numbers on Facebook after years there.
My weeks on Twitter have also seen the visitor numbers for this blog, Jascha Writes, more than triple.
I also like Twitter--for reasons I'm only beginning to understand, and that I hope to write about another day. And I appreciate my followers, and those I follow, beyond motives of PR and ebook sales.
Today I just want to welcome all my Twitter followers--past, present and future--to Jascha Writes and to promise to provide in future posts some fundamentals about myself and my work, starting with my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me. Of course, you can already use the search window in the extreme upper-left corner of this page, or the 'blog archive' listing at the foot of the right-hand column, or the 'labels cloud' a bit higher, to make your way around the posts that are here now. As always, I hope you like what you find, and that you'll want to return.
See you here, and see you on Twitter!
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3 comments:
You will see your follows multiply and you have an endless source to pull some more followers from places like GooglePlus and others. I published a similar book to Jon's after researching how to use the different programs. It is on smashwords at; http://bit.ly/n1twSL Lets keep in touch and compare our progress here and twitter and on FB. Good luck and CIAO!
Jascha, this sounds like something I ought to consider doing too! Being a newbie to Twitter I am pretty much amazed at how vast the audience is.
Yes, Jimmy, and, as Addison suggests, we're seeing only the tip of the iceberg. I'd also like to repeat what isn't said often enough: the audience is not only vast but also richly varied, perhaps because it's less pre-selected than that of other social media. Thanks to both of you for responding here... and let's all tweet on....
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