How Can Twitter Benifit Authors

I like talking about author platforms. Twitter is a big part of mine. Honestly I should focus more on Facebook but personally, I really love twitter.

Simply having an account with a pinned tweet that sends people to a landing page to get email sign ups isn’t enough. If it was, I’d never have learned to love twitter.

Every day or so I meet someone new and have a long direct message conversation, or a long tweet chain. Generally these are not readers. These are other authors. Authors who have also been cultivating an audiance on Twitter.

Because of Twitter I have met two Amazon best selling authors and had good conversations with them about what actions they took to achieve success. I did most of my research for an article about 5 indie authors and their success tips on twitter.

I use crowdfire app to grow my audiance by targeting hashtags and using an auto messenger to send people to my blog with a free offer of cosmic horror stories. In the last week I have had three people read these stories and give me feed back on them.

I’ve read short WIP’s from two aspiring authors and discussed writing with them. Both have read my work. One is an ARC reader.

Because of Twitter I have friends all over the worldwho are authors or are interested in the genre I write.

One friend in particular is Angel Medina. He’s a Scifi and Horror writer whose been making headway in the Lit-RPG and Lit-FPS space. Things I’d have never known about if not for him. He’s guest posted on this blog and talked about what he did to get his book into a kindle Best seller slot.

Rafael Hines is another author I’ve met who has been kind enough to share his story of success with me. But he and Angel are only two of the dozens of people I meet in a week. Interacting is easy. Ask a question, see if someone responds.

I am not sure that twitter is good for garnishing sales until you’ve grown your account to tens of thousands of followers. I really think that you need about 50,000 for your account to really be able to sell something based on what I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to (and research I’ve done.).

I look at my impressions on twitter. Every day about 8,000 impressions are generated by my account. These are impressions to a targeted audience. It would not be cost effective for me to purchase that kind of visability online for a 99 cents book.

You can learn on twitter and you can make friends on twitter. I hope you all do. I enjoy twitter far more than I do facebook and I truely hope that the author community on it continues to grow.