Twitter for Writers: How to navigate the Twittersphere

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My writer-​​friends and edit­ing clients have been beg­ging me for a Twitter how-​​to specif­i­cally tai­lored for writers/​authors. So: here it is! For new­bies, the Twitter-​​verse can be a con­fus­ing jum­ble of 140-​​character-​​length non­sense. Often, I hear writ­ers whin­ing, “Why? What’s the point?”

The sim­plest answer is this: You just can’t afford to avoid or ignore Twitter any longer. Not if you are seri­ous about your writ­ing career. An author/​writer might say that she is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Authonomy, GoodReads, Blogger, etc., and another social net­work will take too much time. This might be a valid point. But the most impor­tant social net­work of all? Twitter. If you do noth­ing else, use Twitter and cre­ate a Web site. Why? Let me count some ways.

Reasons to join the Twittersphere:

1. Twitter isn’t as insu­lar as Facebook. Anyone in any free coun­try can fol­low you (unless you block them). Not so with Facebook. You have to accept friend­ship requests there. It makes the process more clunky.
2. Authonomy​.com is also an insu­lar world. A site built for and fre­quented only by writ­ers. Authonomy is for cri­tiquing and learn­ing to mar­ket your work. It is a micro­cosm of the book mar­ket­place, but ulti­mately, it isn’t where your poten­tial buy­ers are.
3. Blog sites like WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and LiveJournal have an impor­tant place in the writer’s mar­ket­ing toolkit. But some of us aren’t good blog­gers, either due to lack of time or lack of a suf­fi­cient plat­form. Blogging can be quite time con­sum­ing. I know my blog posts usu­ally take me a week to pub­lish because I have very lit­tle time and they require a great deal of research and thought.
4. Twitter’s best value? You can tweet any­time any­where. Yup. That’s its great­est feature.

For the naysayers

Who cares?

You’d be sur­prised who you’ll find on Twitter. Granted, some folks who come to Twitter feel they have to par­tic­i­pate “because everybody’s doing it.” But a great many are on there exchang­ing pub info and arti­cles as well as tweets about their daily writ­ing lives. Who are they? Pubbed and aspir­ing authors. Agents. Editors. Publishers. They have infor­ma­tion to share—why not exchange ideas? I, myself, have been cor­re­spond­ing with agents and edi­tors on Twitter lately. It’s amaz­ing that they’ll take the time to share and answer ques­tions. That’s micro-​​blogging for you. Most of us do have time for a 140-​​character con­ver­sa­tion. It’s quick. That’s Twitter’s stay­ing power.

Why do I want to lis­ten to peo­ple blab about what they had for breakfast?

I’m sure some Twitterers do this on a daily basis, but I don’t fol­low their tweets. I fol­low those who are tweet­ing about their daily writ­ing ritiuals and tri­als though. Why? Because I like to know how oth­ers work on their craft. I might learn new insights and bet­ter ways of work­ing and rework­ing a novel draft. And it’s nice to know that oth­ers find the process dif­fi­cult too. Tweets are small win­dows into indi­vid­ual worlds. Sometimes the tweets are irrel­e­vant to me, some­times they are just what I need to hear.

I don’t have time for Twitter.

Blogging gen­er­ally falls through the cracks for me. It’s dif­fi­cult for me to fit into my sched­ule because it usu­ally requires sev­eral hours of research, writ­ing, edit­ing, and upload­ing to make one go live. Every hour of my day is usu­ally accounted for. However, tweet­ing fits much, much more eas­ily into my on-​​the-​​go lifestyle. As I men­tioned before, I can tweet from my phone, which means I can tweet any time, any­where. I can give real-​​time updates on con­fer­ences I’m attend­ing (I recently uploaded video and pic­tures I had taken of Ursula le Guin speak­ing at a con­fer­ence while it was hap­pen­ing), retweet break­ing indus­try news from insid­ers, and share the lat­est info about my novel. There are a num­ber of pow­er­ful Twitter apps that allow more flex­i­bil­ity and the abil­ity to update mul­ti­ple social net­work­ing sites at once, so that speeds up the process as well.

As of January 2010, Twitter has sky­rock­eted to 75 mil­lion users, accord­ing to RJMetrics Inc., but 80 per­cent of those have tweeted 10 times or less. (Check out a Twitter expert Brian Solis’s blog post “The State of the Twittersphere 2010″ for more detailed sta­tis­tics.) What does this all mean for you? Get talk­ing! Twitter is point­less unless you are join­ing the con­ver­sa­tion. You want to talk with those in the pub­lish­ing indus­try who are using Twitter too. You are engag­ing with an audi­ence that takes iPhones on the Subway, that joins lit­er­ary hash­tag dis­cus­sions. These folks are com­fort­able with emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and social media. These are the folks you want to learn from and talk to. So get on it. No more excuses!

Twitter Success Stories

Read these Twitter suc­cess sto­ries to see how Twitter has worked for other writers:

Writer Debra L. Schubert (@dlschubert) found her agent on Twitter. Guess who? Bernadette Baker-​​Baughman of Baker’s Mark Literary Agency—the same lovely lady who signed me just this year! Debra also co-​​hosts #yal­itchat. Here’s her inspir­ing story: “Did I men­tion I’ve Got an...”

Author Karen Rivers (@karenrivers) shared her story with me via E-​​mail: “After let­ting go of my old agent last sum­mer, I was look­ing around for some­one new and specif­i­cally some­one in the US (I’m Canadian). It seemed almost impos­si­ble to fig­ure out who I liked and who I didn’t until I stum­bled on a few agents on Twitter. I sub­mit­ted to Colleen [Lindsay] because I liked her Twitter per­son­al­ity and she seemed incred­i­bly well-​​connected, fre­quently tweet­ing back and forth with edi­tors, etc. The rest is history!

I also found an edi­tor who I already knew of and really liked and started fol­low­ing her on Twitter. While I was wait­ing to sign with an agent, I subbed to her and she ended up also offer­ing (but I can’t tell you who it is because the deal hasn’t been announced yet). So, two Twitter suc­cess sto­ries in one!”

@StirlingEditor’s cool story: I attended Writers Digest Editor Jane Friedman’s (@janefriedman) fas­ci­nat­ing talk on pub­lish­ing online at a local con­fer­ence last year. We got to talk­ing before her talk, I par­tic­i­pated in a dis­cus­sion about Authonomy​.com dur­ing the work­shop, and about 20 min­utes after the talk, she found me on Twitter and started fol­low­ing me. Wow!

Step 1: Sign up

First off, sign up for an account at Twitter​.com. I don’t think you can sign up any­where else actu­ally. Feel free to post a com­ment in my com­ments sec­tion if that’s not the case. The three most crit­i­cal items at this point are your user­name, bio para­graph, and avatar.

@Username

Writers should prob­a­bly choose their pen name, or what­ever name they will pub­lish under. Mine should be CheriLasota (user­names are case sen­si­tive), but I started my Twitter account orig­i­nally for Stirling Editing, so I went with StirlingEditor at the time. I might change it in the future though. That said, here are some non-​​name user­names that I cer­tainly found intriguing:

@PublishingGuru

@CheekyReads

@PublishingSpy

TIP: If the user­name you are think­ing of using is dif­fi­cult to spell or pro­nounce when spo­ken aloud, con­sider some­thing else. You never know when you’ll be talk­ing in per­son to an agent, edi­tor, or writer who wants to fol­low you on Twitter.

Bio

Your bio is crit­i­cal. In a few short sec­onds, poten­tial fol­low­ers will make a judg­ment call about whether to fol­low you. In my opin­ion, the best bios inform, enter­tain, and pro­vide links. Let me explain. First off, tell us what you’ll be tweet­ing about in your bio. That will let us know whether we’ll find your top­ics rel­e­vant to our inter­ests and help us rule out whether you are a spam­mer. Be sure to include a link to your blog, Web site, or Facebook fan page as well.

Example: @LiaKeyes — British writer Lia Keyes pens tales of mur­der, magic, mys­tery and may­hem for teens with curi­ous minds. Host: #ScribeChat on Thursdays.

Example: @DebraLSchubert — YA & Women’s Fiction writer rep­re­sented by Bernadette Baker-​​Baughman of Baker’s Mark Literary Agency. Slave to six feline cap­tors and http://​debralschu​bert​.blogspot​.com.

Example: @AudryT — Go away—I’m wrestling with my muse, and I’ve almost got his pants off.

Example: @PJJohnson — Yukon Poet Laureate, Author, Playwright, Actress, Musician, Composer. 100% Yukon. Lover of Life. http://​www​.youtube​.com/​u​s​e​r​/​T​h​e​Y​u​k​o​n​r​a​ven

Avatar

Your avatar, or pro­file pic­ture, is impor­tant as well. If you are actively seek­ing an agent or pub­lisher, upload a high qual­ity head­shot. You want to look pro­fes­sional yet approach­able. I was lucky enough to work with a bril­liant, up-​​and-​​coming local pho­tog­ra­pher (Beth Furumasu) recently, but that isn’t nec­es­sary. If you have a great ama­teur photo that cap­tures the essence of your personality—whether seri­ous or funny, quirky or dark—try and clean up the color, etc., in a photo pro­gram, and then upload it.

Step 2: Customize your background

Rather than blather on about this par­tic­u­lar topic, I’ll defer to SocialMediaExaminer’s fan­tas­tic and com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle on the sub­ject: “How to Create a Custom Twitter Background Design.” What I will say is this: I highly rec­om­mend dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing your Twitter​.com page with a new background—either a photo or cus­tom design of some kind. The main rea­son for this is because you want poten­tial fol­low­ers to see in an instant that you aren’t a spam­mer. You are a legit­i­mate Twitterer, with qual­ity infor­ma­tion and con­ver­sa­tion to share. I hope to have my own cus­tom back­ground up soon, but in the mean­time, I am using a free pic­ture I found on TwitrBackgrounds​.com.

Step 3: Sign up for HootSuite​.com

Don’t just use Twitter​.com to access Twitter. It is woe­fully lack­ing in features. Shop around and try a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent Twitter appli­ca­tions to find out which one works best for you. I tried many before set­tling on TweetDeck (lap­top), Echofon (iPhone), and Hootsuite (both iPhone and laptop). Here is my per­sonal take on the ones I’ve tried.

Tweetie: Not bad. Hard to fol­low live chats. Not as many fea­tures as HootSuite or TweetDeck, but easy to switch between mul­ti­ple Twitter accounts. Currently avail­able on Mac, iTouch, iPhone. Tweetie 2 is com­ing soon for iPhone and iPad.

TweetDeck: Until I found HootSuite, this was my Twitter app of choice. I still love it. Works great for stream­ing live chats. Robust, with lots of cool fea­tures. Available on PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, and iPhone.

HootSuite: My favorite app thus far. It’s main draws are sched­uled tweets and the abil­ity to post to mul­ti­ple social networks—such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and your blog—with one click. It also has feature-​​rich inte­gra­tion with Facebook. Available on PC, Mac, Android, and iPhone.

Echofon: I have used Echofon exten­sively on my iPhone. While it doesn’t have sched­uled tweet­ing, I pre­fer look­ing up users on Echofon as opposed to HootSuite on my phone. Available on iPad, iPhone, Mac, Firefox, and Facebook.

There are many more appli­ca­tions, I’m sure. Feel free to weigh in on them in the com­ments sec­tion of this post.

I thought about doing a tuto­r­ial on HootSuite, and then real­ized oth­ers had already done so in a much more eru­dite fash­ion. Here are some links to ori­ent you to HootSuite.com’s feature-​​rich application:

HootSuite Video Tour on YouTube

How to Use HootSuite: Part 1

How to Use HootSuite: Part 2

Grandma Mary’s HootSuite Tutorial

HootSuite: How to do a week of social media mar­ket­ing in just 20 minutes!

How to Use HootSuite & Ping​.FM to Publish Your WordPress Blog to All Your Social Media Sites

Learn the lingo

DM = Direct Message

A direct mes­sage is pri­vate, not pub­lic. When you select “direct mes­sage”, only the per­son you call out in the mes­sage will see it. This can be help­ful when you want to take a con­ver­sa­tion offline—whether because it is of a per­sonal nature or you are dis­cussing busi­ness details about a poten­tial work­ing rela­tion­ship, etc. Depending on the pro­gram you are using, there are a vari­ety of ways to send a direct mes­sage. Echofon says “Send a DM,” HootSuite says “Send DM,” and TweetDeck says “Direct Message.” Twitter​.com requires you to click on your own direct mes­sages link from your home page and then search for a fol­lower with a handy drop-​​down menu.

NOTE: You can­not DM a Twitterer unless he/​she is fol­low­ing you. Keeps down the spam mes­sages, you know.

NOTE 2: You can eas­ily direct mes­sage some­body by sim­ply typ­ing a d + space before a person’s user­name, like so:

d @StirlingEditor: Yo, wassup!

RT = Retweeting

Retweeting is good twe­ti­quette as well as a quick way to share infor­ma­tion or inspi­ra­tional snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion among your Tweeps (see below for def­i­n­i­tion). Retweeting is sim­ply for­ward­ing some­one else’s tweets to your fol­low­ers. I highly rec­om­mend this as a way to join con­ver­sa­tions and get to know peo­ple. We’re always grate­ful for a retweet. =)

According to Solis, “120 is the new 140. If you leave room at the end of your tweet for @username and poten­tial com­men­tary, you make it effort­less for some­one to RT you.”

Tweep

A vari­ant of the word “peeps;” as in “Gonna go hang with my peeps.” Peeps and Tweeps are short­hand for friends.

Twittersphere/​Twitterverse

The world/​universe of Twitter, or any­where you can tweet using any application.

Still want more Tweet Lingo? Knock your­self out:

Twitter Lingo: A Quick Guide A few basic terms.

Twictionary A ridicu­lously com­pre­hen­sive list.

Twitter Dictionary A lingo list, but scroll to the bot­tom and you’ll find a cool hyper­linked list of Twitter-​​related tools, wid­gets and applications.

Who do I follow?

1. Don’t start fol­low­ing oth­ers until you have around ten tweets of value under your belt. When you do start fol­low­ing oth­ers, the first thing poten­tial fol­low­ers will do is look at your bio and your tweet stream to ensure that you aren’t a spam­mer and that you have some­thing of value to add to their Twitter home feed.
2. Before you start search­ing for Tweeps, think about what you want to use Twitter for. Do you want to net­work with those in the pub­lish­ing indus­try? Start fol­low­ing other writers/​authors first and fore­most. Join a live chat about the indus­try once in a while. Start dis­cussing top­ics of inter­est to you and other writ­ers. Retweet their tweets. Once you have a healthy fol­low­ing of writer Tweeps, start fol­low­ing agents you are inter­ested in query­ing as well as those who agent out­side of your genre. All will have great infor­ma­tion to share. Also check out #askagent.
3. You don’t have to fol­low every­one who fol­lows you. It is best to check their bios and tweet feeds briefly to ensure the top­ics they tweet on are rel­e­vant to you. You’ll also want to make sure they aren’t spam­mers (easy to spot because they usu­ally only have one tweet in their feeds or mul­ti­ple spam tweets).

But what do I talk about?!

Ah, yes. The peren­nial ques­tion. Easy answer? Whatever you want. Longwinded answer? Here we go . . .

Dos

• Do let us in on your day’s hap­pen­ings. Did you go to a con­fer­ence, get some writ­ing done, go to an author read­ing? We want to know about it! Really. We do. Why? Because we’re all voyeurs. Don’t you want to know what a typ­i­cal day is like for an agent, an edi­tor, a NYT Bestselling author? Of course. Doesn’t everyone?
• Do pay atten­tion to what oth­ers are tweet­ing and how they are tweet­ing. Most of us are kind retweet­ers, which allows the orig­i­nal Twitterer to poten­tially gain a new audi­ence among your fol­low­ers. Most all par­tic­i­pate in #WW (Writer Wednesdays) and #FF (Follow Fridays), which are two ways Twitterers like to get the word out about their fel­low Tweeps. Do peo­ple share links to arti­cles and blogs about indus­try news? Yes! You should too. Spread the news and spread the love.
• Do learn more about hash­tags and how to use them. For a gold­mine of infor­ma­tion on these lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion groupers, check out this mas­ter list of how-​​tos: “Secrets of Twitter Hashtags (For Those Still Unsure).”
• Do par­tic­i­pate in live chats about the pub­lish­ing indus­try when you have time. They increase your vis­i­bil­ity and allow you to find new folks to fol­low. Here are some of my favorites:
  • #LitChat: Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 1–2 p.m. PST/4–5 p.m. EST
  • #YalitChat: Wednesdays, 6–7 p.m. PST, 9–10 p.m. EST
  • #ScribeChat: Thursdays, 6–7 p.m. PST, 9–10 p.m. EST
  • #AskAgent
  • #SciFiChat: Fridays, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. PST/2–4 p.m. EST
  • #ScriptChat: Sundays, 5 p.m. PST/​8 p.m. EST
  • #WriteChat: Sundays
  • #PBLitChat: Sundays, 6:30 p.m. PST/9:30 p.m. EST

Don’ts

• Don’t let your Twitter feed rule your life. I don’t want to be respon­si­ble for social net­work­ing break­downs . . . Here, check out this nifty blog post by Dr. John Grohol, founder of PychCentral​.com: “The Psychology of Twitter.” It might put things into per­spec­tive. Yes, the con­ver­sa­tion is always on, always run­ning. And yes, you may even­tu­ally have hun­dreds, even thou­sands, of fol­low­ers, but you can’t fol­low everybody’s feeds all of the time. Not humanly pos­si­ble. If you want to find out what a par­tic­u­lar per­son is tweet­ing about, sim­ply check out his or her feed updates. No need to browse the slush to find it. But if you have a five-​​minute break, why not scroll through a bit of your home feed and see what everyone’s talk­ing about? That way you can retweet or respond to tweets that inter­est you.
• Don’t just com­plain about life or work on Twitter. If you are per­pet­u­ally neg­a­tive or whiny, your fol­low­ers will start to drop you. Wouldn’t you want to unfol­low  some­one like that? Just think about what you’d want to read, and that will be a great guide as you begin tweeting.
• Don’t dis­cuss very per­sonal details about your­self, such as your home address, phone num­ber, bank account num­bers(!?), etc. It’s just commonsense.

What does @StirlingEditor tweet about, one might dare to ask . . .?

Here’s a small sam­pling of some of my recent tweets below to give you an idea of what you might tweet on.

Imparting thoughts on writing

@StirlingEditor: Fiction writ­ing is such a gift. A way to express our most inti­mate thoughts in the guise of an imag­i­nary and invin­ci­ble self.

Discussing the process

@StirlingEditor: I’m miss­ing my writ­ing a lit­tle bit today. But I’m doing my mar­ket­ing and edit­ing work like the good girl I am. *pol­ishes halo*

Sharing news

@StirlingEditor: Watch the book trailer for my YA his­tor­i­cal romance, Artemis Rising, at www​.cher​i​la​sota​.com.

This post is get­ting ridicu­lously long, but as you can see, I’m merely scratch­ing the sur­face when it comes to what Twitter and Twitter apps can do. Feel free to share your two cents’ worth in the com­ments sec­tion or post a link to help­ful blog posts/​articles/​apps you’ve tried and love. Tweet away, my writerly Tweeps!

Tagged as: book marketing, Brian Solis, direct message, HootSuite.com, retweet, tweet, TweetDeck.com, Tweetie.com, Twitter.com, twittersphere