Build Your Author Platform With Twitter
Catharine Bramkamp, Author
Welcome to Twitter Tuesdays where I feature tips on how to use Twitter for authors by authors. This week we have tips on building your platform with Twitter from author, poet and fellow book coach, Catharine Bramkamp. Thanks Catharine! You can follow her on Twitter here.
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A bird sits outside my window. He greets the dawn with a chirp thats less melody and more car alarm: piercing, random and difficult to ignore. So I wearily get up. And close the window. I picture him as an angry bird and this is the sound of his tweet.
Social media is not a small country fair where you know many people you pass by. Social Media, Twitter in particular is more like the narrow passageways in the souk in Cairo or the crowded booths in the night market of Hong Kong. Here you must search through the agora to find stalls selling the things you love and need and more important, catering to people you want to meet.
These people share your interests and needs, and as a result, will be interested in your recommendations, comments, and eventually, your own products.
Building a platform to see over the heads of the general crowd will make it easier and faster to pick out the like-minded people from this market crowd. If the platform is built well, they in turn can easily see you. Twitter is part of that platform.
First, know that to effectively introduce yourself in this market, use your own name. Marketing your writing will, over the course of the years, be necessarily fluid. Tweet under your own name so your product selection can change under that name.
Like a conversation in the alleys of a market or the aisles of Safeway, Twitter must serve as a legitimate conversation in the first place. You wouldn’t stop someone in the middle of their shopping to demand that since they have tomatoes in their cart, they will love your book on Croatia. However you would help someone reach the can of peaches on the top shelf. You also could discuss peaches in general while you’re there.
You may segue into Croatian peaches. You may not, because blogging and tweeting must serve the reader.
Conversation is more effective than the constant sale and promotion.
We all know what to do as non-fiction writers, but what about your fabulous novel? How do you tweet or blog about that?
First, the current advice (from many sources) is to not post chapters of the book on your blog. Instead blog and tweet about the book. Can you tap into genre fans? Can you tap into fans of the area (were you clever enough to set your book in the Hawaiian Islands? Or Paris?)
Tweet about the setting, ask question about the topic, link to other authors who write about the same place you do. Or write about a similar topic. Hang out with people who are talking about subjects close to your book.
Why strike up a conversation at all?
Because you never know who you’ll meet at the big Night Market, you never know what treasures you will find.
Grab your name, link up with some new friends and open the window to let new music in!
More About Catharine Bramkamp, Writing Coach
YourBookStartsHere.com
Don’t Write Like You Talk
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More Twitter Tips for Authors next Tuesday, and more to come in my forthcoming ebook, The Writer’s Guide to Twitter for Fiction Authors.
