From my original blog post at ThrillersRus 6/30/11

The power of twitter

I published my thriller, The Ninth District, on kindle and nook a couple of weeks ago. As soon as it was available, I put out a tweet to tell the twitterverse that I'd published it along with a link on where to buy it. I sent out the initial tweet at to my 1300 followers. Within minutes it was retweeted by 6 of my twitter friends and the message was out to another 5,000 people.


I have family and some friends and some of them know how to read and actually like to read. I put out the same message to some of them in email or on the phone. But it was over a week, and they may have told some of their friends, but I don't know it they did or not. 
There is no way I can reach as many people who are interested in writing and reading in such a short amount of time as I was able to do with twitter. 

          1 tweet to 1300 followers, 6 retweets in  minutes to 5,000 followers. I like Twitter.

The power of groups

Groups of people form together around a common purpose or interest. They develop a camaraderie. Writers commiserate about the writing process, roadblocks and rejections. They celebrate a great review, a new release and provide companionship while a writer is alone trying to get the words on the page. 

One group I've joined and support is the Independent Author Network, which goes by the hash tag #IAN1.  This is a group of independent multi-genre published authors committed to supporting each other in the area of writing and marketing and publicity using social media. 

Here's the power of groups. (Don't let the numbers scare you) There are 180 IAN members. They have a combined total of 225,000 followers. If we're committed to retweeting each other's tweets we can get a single tweet out to 192,600 unique followers and if they retweet it, even more. Like waves in a pool it just keeps spreading out until it peters out. 

Now, not everyone sees your tweet or retweets it, so it doesn't get that big, but with a group it gets a lot bigger, a lot faster then it could on its own. 

There are a couple of other groups out there I follow as well; #MyWana and #pubwrite. Find one that feels right, participate in the discussion and support the group and you will feel the power of the group.

There is no way I can reach as many people who are interested in writing and reading in such a short amount of time as I was able to do with twitter.

From my original blog post at ThrillersRus Oct 24, 2010 
I’ve decided to independently publish my thriller on the kindle. My goal is to publish it around Christmas when I anticipate many new readers will be receiving kindles as gifts and will be looking for books to load and read.   


How do I market myself? I’ve started a blog and started to tweet. I’m trying to figure out where to spend my time to try and reach my audience. There are options and I only have so much time. Between blogging, Twitter, Facebook and other options, like Kindleboards or blog tours I need to figure out where I should focus. Here’s a little of what I’ve learned or what I’ve observed recently getting into Twitter.

I started my blog September 3rd.  The question was how to get people to find it. I’ve commented on postings on other blogs with my blog link in my signature. I’ve become a follower on other blogs that I like. But that seems very passive. 

I started tweeting  Sept 22nd. I’ve tried to find other writers and people interested in suspense and thrillers to follow. I periodically post and sometimes have a link back to my blog. Twitter is much less passive compared to blogging, here is an example.

I agreed to be part of the JA Konrath Draculas marketing experiment posting my review on my blog. In addition I tweeted on it.  On Monday Oct 18th I tweeted about Draculas and linked it to my blog as part of Twitter’s #mentionmonday.

• My Tweet went out to my 140 followers.
• 6 people retweeted it getting my tweet out to 10,565 people.
• Two people who received the retweet, retweeted it and it got out to an additional 10,009 people.
• That’s a total of 20,714 people who got my tweet with a link to my blogpost review.

According to the tiny url stats, 200 people clicked on the link in the tweet to my blog post. Other posts I’ve done have had clicks of 8-20. 

Tweeting on a topic of interest to others on occasions like #MentionMonday will capture the attention of people on Twitter and help drive more traffic to my blog where people can get more detailed info.  More exposure than I would ever get on my own simply posting to my blog.