10 Things I Learned as an Author on Twitter

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Wow, I can hardly believe it’s been almost six years since I joined Twitter—and five since I actually started using it regularly (shifting eyes from side to side).

As an Author Tweeter, abbreviated to AT for convenience in this post, I have some experiences and tips to share with you. Please remember that I offer these from an emotional point of view (notice the right side of the above brain), with no research into the scientific aspects of social media marketing. I leave that to technology lovers.

1. Automation. Because I enjoy connecting with other ATs and people who share common interests with me, I don’t use any type of automation for my tweet scheduling, re-tweeting, following, or thanking. I discover something new to enjoy every day on Twitter, so I often adjust the tweets I’d planned to use, find new people to follow, and discover new ideas or information I want to re-tweet (RT). I prefer to personally choose all of those and to thank new followers and RT-ers, often by following them back, but only after I check out their profiles. (More on that farther down in the post.) For authors who have little time or patience for Twitter and would like to learn more about automation, take a look look at this informative site.

2. Twitter Handle. How I wish more authors simply used their author names for their handles when setting up their accounts. I wrote about this in my post Is That You?
3. Hashtags. Once I got the hang of using hashtags in my tweets, I couldn’t stop searching for those related to the content of my books and the audiences I wanted to reach. My #YA novels are about #friendship and much more. I always research a new hashtag I’m considering by typing it into the Twitter search window and seeing how many and what kinds of profiles are associated with it. Some of the most innocent hashtags may be associated with unsavory profiles, so beware. Following the advice I’ve received, I limit the number of hashtags I use in a single tweet to three. But sometimes I use four because I just can’t help myself. Other writers of Young Adult (YA) fiction should check out 30 Effective Twitter Hashtags for YA Authors.

4. Re-tweeting Etiquette. If another Tweeter, particularly an author, RTs about my books, I quickly go to his or her profile and look for something good to RT in return. I don’t RT erotica or books with very gory covers, but I don’t often have to make that decision. Sometimes a good tweet to RT is right there near the top of the profile page, or sometimes I find one in their media list on the left. Which brings me to …

5. Pinned tweets. I want to encourage each visitor to my profile to RT something of mine, and I try to make that as easy as possible. Every author should have a good, timely, and relevant tweet pinned to the top of his or her profile, ready and waiting for visitors. So many author profiles I visit do not have one, or they have a pinned tweet about an expired special price or “new” release from last year. I now make an effort to change my pinned tweet once to several times per week.

6. Trends. I look to the left side of my profile page or news feed to see which hashtagged topics are trending. I’ve found some great tie-ins to my books that way, such as National (Whatever) Day. I immediately search to confirm if a hashtagged topic is appropriate for my book(s) and compose a tweet using it. Sometimes a topic leads to someone I can relate to, so …

7. Who to follow. I could spend hours each day searching on Twitter for people who have interest in the issues or themes covered in my novels. Or in my hobbies or other personal interests. Half the time, the new people I find follow back. But I’ve learned to pay attention to when they last tweeted before I follow. If they haven’t tweeted at least once a month in the past several months, they ‘re not active enough for me.

8. When to follow back. Unless I’m sure of someone’s identity, I don’t follow back without scanning a number of tweets. I can’t always judge by a pinned tweet or the first few as to whether it’s someone I want to follow. Experience has taught me to compare the number of followers to the number of follows of anyone. Too many times I have followed back to discover in a few days that I have been unfollowed. My rule of thumb for now is not to follow back if there are 15% or more followers than  follows. I make an exception for the famous.

9. Blocking.  If you haven’t done this yet—trust me—you will. I block followers who have distasteful images or text in their profiles or who obviously are looking for a mate. But do …

10. Interaction. I often demonstrate that I like a another’s tweet and sometimes reply to the tweet with a positive comment or an answer if a question was posed. This interaction is a great way to make a connection that may eventually call attention to my books.

Creating My First Book Trailer

When it comes to marketing my books, I’m not typically a procrastinator. But until a week ago, I did not have a single book trailer video for any of my three published books (including the one out of print).

I’d written some copy for one.

I’d thought about the tone I wanted.

I’d searched for images.

I’d talked to my husband about producing one together.

I even had a YouTube channel set up and waiting.

But still, no trailer.

What lit a fire under me to move forward was the offer of a fellow author to post our author group’s video trailers on Instagram.

Excited by that prospect, I inquired from other authors which program they used. (Is program the correct word? I’m not sure.) I also researched a bit online.

I soon learned that many used Animoto or Vimeo to produce their own videos. However, my husband and I have Macs, and iMovies was already available to us.

We selected a pre-fab theme from among many free themes with built-in music. We weren’t quite happy with our first try, because not enough time was built in for the text frames unless we used only a handful of words. And the built-in background and text color made it harder to read. My husband could find no way to change the colors.

After I cut back on the text somewhat and my husband figured out how to add a second or so to those frames without the music ending too soon, we were pleased.

Until you produce your own book trailer video, you can’t imagine the planning and coordination it involves. We learned a lot that we’ll apply to our next production–a trailer for book two.

So, ladies and gentlemen, here’s my trailer for 8 Notes to a Nobody. I hope you enjoy it.

Do you have an experience to share about producing a book trailer ?

 

 

30 Effective Twitter Hashtags for YA Authors

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It’s hard to remember to use the most productive hashtags when I tweet about my books. I’ve found a few sources that list hashtags for authors in general but none specifically for those of teen or young adult novels. So I created my own list based on experience in tweeting about teen fiction over the past twelve months.

Most of these hashtags have gained attention for me and perhaps will work for you. Some are just now catching on. Genre hashtags cross over from adult to teen/YA in most cases, so I included a few. Capitalization is irrelevant.

#YA (ob-vi-ous-ly!)

#YAlit

#YAfiction

#YAloving

#YAbooknerd (or #booknerd)

#IReadYA

#teenlit

#teenfiction

#teenlife

#ChristianTeen (or other religion + teen)

#booksforgirls (or #booksforboys)

#CleanTeenRead

#adventure

#dystopian

#mystery

#scifi

#teenromance

#boyfriend

#bullying

#dating

#eatingdisorder

#firstlove

#friendship

#teensuicide

#socialissues

#parents (or #family or #stepfamily)

#schoolproblems

#highschool

#dance (or the other arts)

#sports (or a specific sport)

Those are my current favorites! What are your go-to hashtags when tweeting about your own writing?

 

 

 

 

 

10 Things I Learned From My Facebook Party

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… that might help with yours!

Last week I hosted a virtual event celebrating the release of the first two novels of my Bird Face series. The party was great fun, but as one author friend recognized, a lot of work.

There’s nothing like attending a few Facebook parties to get a feel for their dynamics before you make the decision whether or not to host one. I popped into several as I geared up to create my own. I recommend you visit a few—to participate in or simply “lurk”—and pay attention to the following.

1. If you’ve selected a location city in your true time zone for the Facebook account that is associated with your event, the time zone for your party will be correct. I didn’t have a city designated beforehand, and my first party notification showed up with the wrong zone. If you don’t want to give your exact location on Facebook, choose another one in your time zone. You will see a time zone indicated on any Facebook event page you visit.
2. Choose the day and time period for your party carefully. I had to consider a number of things. School had started, so teens and teachers were busy during the middle of the day. Football season had kicked in (no pun intended), and high school or college games might be scheduled on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday evenings. The Friday of the week I chose happened to be 9/11, so I didn’t want to use that day. I chose Thursday and decided to start the party right before lunch (mine), which would be morning on the U.S. west coast and lunchtime on the east. I hoped that would catch interested stay-at-home parents, home educators, and people on their lunch breaks. (Someone dropped in for a while before heading to work.) The party hours extended until 7 p.m. to include people after school and after some day jobs in most time zones.
3. Choose the length of the event to suit yourself and anyone helping you. There’s nothing wrong with a short party of two hours. Mine was long for more reasons than I mentioned above. One reason was that I recently moved and didn’t know when I’d make the acquaintance of enough people to invite to an actual party. Another was that I no longer work a day job, so I figured I might as well make the most of a virtual party.
4. As discussed in Behind the Scenes—12 tasks for book authors before the release, have at least one giveaway. In addition to your books and books from other authors, consider some unusual items that relate to your story. Either hint about the connection or come right out and say it. The most popular giveaway at my party was an art print donated by a book illustrator that related to my character’s love for animals. If your party is short, you may have time for only one or two giveaways. I had twelve. Remember—for any giveaway that you are responsible for shipping or mailing, the cost for that might be more than the value of the giveaway. But for me, having fun with my party’s attendees was more important.
5. Make the criteria for entering each giveaway you planned interesting but not too exclusive. I scared myself during two of them. One novel being given away was about twins, and I asked for comments to be about twins the person commenting knew. I wanted the comments to be entertaining, but it took so long for anyone to comment, I wondered if perhaps not many people knew or remembered twins. Another novel was about angels. I’d heard a lot of guardian-angel stories in my life and thought that sharing a true-life guardian angel story would be a good criterion for commenting and entering the giveaway. Again, participation was minimal. Sometimes the criterion for a giveaway was simply to express a desire for it. Sometimes including a photo gave the commenter an additional entry.
6. How do you schedule the giveaways? I struggled with this the most. In the initial planning, I thought I’d have each giveaway run two hours but overlap. Then reality set in. I was afraid I would lose track. I was glad I decided to have one contest (with me as judge) that ran most of the party but have the other giveaways last one hour each (except for a special one that extended to two hours). I did run two one-hour giveaways simultaneously when it seemed appropriate. For example, during a giveaway for boys, I also ran one for girls. However, I made all giveaways start and stop exactly at any given hour. So a giveaway might read like this—2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
   GIVEAWAY blah-blah-blah, and state how to enter.
7. There may be lulls in participation activity, but there may be times when you need someone to fix you a snack because you’re afraid to tear your eyes away from the screen. I experienced a 30-minute period of no activity during my lunchtime (contrary to what I believed would happen), so I made sure to stretch and take care of personal matters.
8. I cannot stress how important having prepared posts ready and waiting on a Word document was. It allowed me to play with the timing and wording of giveaways in advance. And I was able to copy from the document and paste each new giveaway onto the Facebook event page in a second as an old one was ending. I was able to easily repeat later in the day a giveaway that had no activity earlier. It happened to be the one for the art print, which became wildly popular by evening.
9. Obviously, you must picture your giveaways so people know exactly what they’d receive if they won. I had a folder on my desktop containing all the book covers and other images I needed for my posts. So … copy and past the necessary text, attach the correct image(s), and voila!
10. On everything but the contest, the names of the entrants were written on squares of paper, folded up, and placed in a “hat,” which was actually a bowl. I used two bowls at once because of the way I structured my party, but you might do something different. The winning name for each giveaway was drawn from the hat/bowl. This worked fine. I announced the winner immediately in a comment on that giveaway’s post and asked the person to message me with the needed e-mail or physical address, as the case may have been. For winners who did not contact me by the end of the party, I messaged them. If a winner was a friend of a friend, I also messaged her for help.

In the end, my party was worth the effort. Not only did I attract new readers to my books but also to the other authors’ that donated theirs as giveaways.

If you’ve hosted a Facebook event, how did it go? What can you share that you learned? If it was a book launch party, I’d love to hear if you experienced anything very different from mine.

Cynthia

Is That You? or, How to Choose a Social Media Name

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If you are any type of writer or artist, you probably have created one or more of the following to promote yourself: blog, website, professional Facebook page, Twitter account.

How did you choose names for them?

As I’ve acquired friends and followers who are writers or book authors, I’ve met with confusion at times. Why would someone who writes and wants to be noticed and recognized choose different names for their various sites and accounts? (I ask this while posting on a blog named after one of my characters, but I have wondered if I made a huge error in judgment.)

Of course, if you own a site with content about a topic other than your books or art, the title might not necessarily include your name. But shouldn’t your name appear somewhere on the site? When I visit a blog by any title on any topic, I search for the owner(s) and author(s) of the posts. If I don’t find one right away–not even via the “about” tab–I tend not to follow. I mean, why should I trust what this anonymous person has to say?

I make it a point to “Like” my author friends’ Facebook author pages, but sometimes it’s so hard to find them! If a writer uses his real name (or close to it) as his author name, wouldn’t it make sense to title the author page with that name first? Then follow it by the word “author” or “writer” or “author of …” That way, someone can search by the person’s name first instead of guessing and typing variations of possible titles. When they type the author’s name in the search window, the author/writer page should pop up along with his personal page.

Some new authors use the title of their first book as the title of the Facebook page. That’s not really thinking ahead—or positively—because doesn’t any author want to publish more than one book? Sounds like he could end up with many pages to keep up with in the future. And unfortunately, some Facebook pages I’ve looked at don’t provide the author’s name anywhere at all. Huh? I’ve strained my eyes to read the author’s name on a book cover image to be sure I reached the right page. Some book titles are popular and found on numerous books.

I so appreciate an author using his name, in whole or in part, in his Twitter handle. That’s much easier to remember than a cute or clever handle, although when some of us joined Twitter, we weren’t sure what to do.

If you now have a Twitter handle different from the name under which you are published and also different from your blog or website name, and you are about to open an Instagram account, give the following some thought. I recently learned that it’s a good idea to use your real (or pen) name for Instagram so people can find you, and that it should match your Twitter handle. But if you plan to change your Twitter handle to your real (or pen) name, better to do it before you have a lot of followers and links to your Twitter account in places like your blog, website, and posts on other peoples’ sites. I think I’d leave mine alone rather than go through what I read one blogger had to go through to make the change.

Whew! There’s so much to learn about best practices in using social media for marketing, I struggle. I truly admire you guys who are experts at it.

Are you happy with the names you’ve created for yourself on social media? Have you tried to change any, and what degree of success did you experience?