Self-Publishing And Twitter - Early Days

About a month ago, I made a decision to up my Twitter usage, to see what happened. (Yeah, bit late, get with it, blah, blah, I know).

I wanted to see if Twitter could get my name out there and maybe boost sales of my books on Kindle or Smashwords.

I had a whole three followers before I started this, and was following about 10 people, mainly famous folk – Stephen Fry of course, Simon Pegg, some other amusing folk. 

So, without further ado, even though there hasn't been a single ado in this post yet, here’s what’s happened since:

I’m now hovering around the 100 followers mark. Mostly fellow self-published authors. But also the occasional Russian lady.

I’m already conscious that repetitive promotional tweets of my books may be putting off some followers and tempting them to click that dreaded unfollow button. So I keep them to a minimum and make sure they’re bloody interesting.

I’ve clicked on plenty of links suggested by tweets from some of the 130 odd people I’m now following. Usually useful tips and advice about self-publishing.

I haven’t bought any of the books some of the people I’m following have tweeted about. But I have clicked on a fair few links. (With all this writing and working to be done, I don’t get to read much.)

Some authors constantly retweet the same tweets selling their books. At the moment, that’s fine with me. Probably because I’m doing the same sort of thing.

The number of followers I’ve had fluctuates. I expect some people get pissed off with any kind of book promotion and just, well piss off and unfollow me. Fair enough.

I've turned into a Follower Hunter. I started off with a Tweet and Wait policy. Put something witty out there and wait for the followers to flood in. They trickled. So I had to get all proactive.

Of the 100 odd Tweets I’ve twittered on about over the past month, 1 has been retweeted.

But here’s the bottom line, which is why I’ve put it at the bottom and made it look like a line:

I haven’t sold any extra books.