Promote Your Novel by Expanding Your Social Networking Platform, Part 1, a Post by R. Clint Peters

The #1 question everyone has about their book and how to sell it is “What can I personally do to help promote my novel?”   I have previously written about the importance of social networking in developing and expanding your author’s platform.   I recently received an email from my publisher that confirms many of the things I have been writing.  Many of the ideas in the email were things I knew about, and have written about in The Book Reviewers Club blog.  A couple are suggestions I hadn’t considered, but I think are important enough to blog about.

Social Media sites have developed into an amazing way to promote ourselves as an author, but knowing how to use them efficiently is what is important.

Most of you have Twitter accounts, but for those of you who don’t, it is simply a site where you receive (and post) comments up to 140 characters long and everyone who follows you sees what content you add.  Getting followers on Twitter can take years, but there are great shortcuts to gain a following fast.

First, seek out other authors on twitter who write the same genres as you do.

Follow them, and follow all of their followers.  (See below for instructions on following the followers.)

Give it a week or two, and remove all the ones who didn’t follow you back using a service like tweetadder or twitterKarma.  Generally you can gain around 1000 followers per month if you follow around 100 people each day which only takes a few minutes.

Next use an auto tweet service such as tweetdeck or dynamic tweets to schedule reoccurring tweets about your book(s) at least once an hour, every hour, year round.  Each tweet should contain a link to your book, and end with “Plz RT”.

Do not quote your book…compare it to others of your genre who already have a name…this works well.

Yesterday, I went into my Twitter account, selected one of my followers, and then followed 100 of the followers of my follower.  Every time I read than sentence , it is confusing.   But, in less than 24 hours, my followers total has increased by twenty.  I have also downloaded a couple Twitter assistants, DynamicTweets was one of the programs I downloaded, and have set them up for autotweeting.

How do you follow the followers of those who follow your?  It’s not difficult.

!)  Go the box on the upper left side of your Twitter page.  Look for “Followers”.

2)    Click on “Followers”

3)    Scroll down the list and find an author who might be similar to you

4)    Click the name of that author (it’s the bold print next to the author’s photo)

5)    When the profile summary is displayed, click on “Followers”.  The list displayed will be the people following the author you just clicked.

6)    Scroll down the list, and follow the first 100 on the list.  It takes about 3 minutes to follow 100 Twitter accounts.

The biggest time consumer was signing up for a Twitter assistant, and then setting up the autotweet function.  I have only two autotweets set up for the next 30 days.  I attempted to copy a previous tweet, and was told that I was spamming Twitter.  Don’t copy any tweets.  Get creative in your tweet.  As you may have noticed, redundant tweets are the reason you don’t like to read the tweets scrolling down your computer screen.

We are all looking for ways to sell our books.  I would like to thank my publisher for the ideas that have been presented to me.  I will be posting Part 2 in the next few days.  Keep coming back to The Book Reviewers Club blog for new ideas.

#ExpandingYourAuthorPlatorm #RClintPeters