C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

10/25/2013 • 10:12 AM 2

I like you more when your dog dies: Niches, conversations, dead blogs and a contest.

We don’t sell anything unless we tell stories. To sell stories, we must have stories about our books.

Seth Godin’s blog and books sell because they’re short, pithy, smart and he owns his niche. To own a niche now, you’d do better define a new one. Don’t try to take Seth’s purple cow, tribe or incisive observations about case studies. (Note: “Case studies” is the more scientific word for “stories.”)

Define your own niche and you’ve got a better shot at selling more books.

For instance, my next book is about Romeo in a drug-infested, coming-of-age thriller in New York. Shakespeare plays a role in finding the modern Juliet. Coming-of-age and thriller aren’t normally such cozy neighbors. My last book was a zombie apocalypse with an autistic hero and Latin proverbs. Not a lot of competition in that end of the zombie market.

Season One of This Plague of Days is the siege.

Season One of This Plague of Days is the siege.

Familiarity is overdone. Differences define us in the market. (e.g. Bookstores are still crammed with Harry Potter knock-offs, but there’s only one JK Rowling.) Take something familiar and find a way to make it original again and you’ve got something.

Story is the most important thing. Story works.

Podcasts don’t sell unless they’re rich in content and tell stories. From business success to how-to and gee-whiz science, podcasts don’t work as sales engines unless they tell aspirational stories. From the startlingly different (Welcome to Night Vale) to personal confession (Marc Maron’s WTF) stories must be told and be relatable.

I’ve noticed more authors seem to be shifting their cyber-presence to Facebook and away from Twitter. They’re all Twittered out. Tweets are solid tools of discovery and live-tweeting makes the Oscars watchable, but Twitter tends to be less about story and connection. We need a little more space to achieve resonance.

Facebook offers more opportunity for personal connection. FB’s post length helps, but it’s also subtext. On Facebook, you have friends. 

Twitter is less friendly and more competitive. On Twitter, people have followers and people pay attention to numbers gained and lost. On Twitter you use ManageFlitter and WhoUnfollowedMe. On Facebook, if crazy Aunt Sadie unfriends you, you’re relieved you can swear again and her abandonment confirms your politics are sane.

Personal stories help us plug into each other’s pleasure centres.

The mind often fails to make distinctions among what’s real and illusory, cyber and real world. On Facebook, Story is the carrier wave of connection: “This is my child, my dog, my life!” we tell each other.

Since we don’t know what the hell we’re doing and we’re all scared, our connections reassure us. “Maybe I’ve screwed everything up, but at least I’m making the same mistakes as everyone else in our journey toward a better tomorrow.”

That’s why your photo catalogue of a glorious tropical vacation on Facebook doesn’t fit into the brain’s three-prong plug of connection. People love shared stories of failure, vulnerability and happiness, but only after that happiness is earned by failure and vulnerability. We root for the underdog and rags-to-riches stories, not Donald Trump. Your new car is nice for you, but I like you more when your dog dies. My dog died. Commonality is currency. Because I want to be loved, I love you when you’re suffering insomnia from worry, too. Misery doesn’t just love company. It insists on it.

Though we are each mysteries, we like to imagine we are each other.

Each of us is just as challenged and sad and lonely, but we hope to be rich some day, too. When the money and success roll in, we tend to forget all this stuff about connection. We blame the poor for their poverty, give luck no credit for our rise and trumpet all our hard work to the exclusion of any variable that does not bow to our big ol’ brains.

No wonder the rich and poor hate each other (except the poor want to join the resented rich, too.) Meanwhile, the rich would rip out their own throats with car keys from their repossessed Lexus if they had to get by on less than $100,000 a year.

Our class boundaries break connections. That’s why celebrities seem so otherworldly in person. They lost their shock collars and passed the invisible electric fence! They made it, so we can, too! Unless they’re the children of celebrities. Those lucky devils get a sneer and a Barry Bonds asterisk beside their fame.

Our stories about who we are become who we are.

That quest for privacy? Quaint. Adorable. Amish.

Jonathan Franzen worries about our attention spans, the death of literature and loss of privacy. He worries about the horrors of the Internet, just about every week it seems, in the Huffington Post. Horrors.

Blogs are dead sales platforms.

You have to have an author site, but you’ll get more juice from connecting on Facebook. Twitter will serve you better than a blog because it serves more people.

A blog is too much of a commitment for the reader. Too few blogs are “appointment reading”. A blog is a magazine at the doctor’s office. You only pick it up when there’s nothing else to do and you’d rather be doing something else.

I am subscribed to many blogs. They’re up there somewhere, forgotten in an RSS reader, added to a long reading list I will never get to. The blogs I actually read daily don’t have to be stuck in my bottomless bookmark bin. I go to them.

Blogs fail because signals go out but they don’t connect. Like this post, a bad blog post pontificates. I’m doing it now, connecting less, to fewer people. Still here? You’re already hoping the meta will stop and I’ll somehow pull out of the dive and land a punch and a point in the final sentence. How will I bring us home after such a depressing, meandering trip? I’ll show you. Indulge, a moment more, before the doctor calls you in to talk about those test results.

There are exceptional blogs, still breathing.

You can tell which blogs still have a heartbeat. They have a large and active comment community who aren’t just there to fight. (The Passive Voice is necessary to indie writers, for instance, as is David Gaughran’s blog.) Their lure is a story of aspirational subtext: Read this and you will succeed as we analyze the mistakes and triumphs of others.

And what are comments but the back from the forth? The best comments are more stories, resonating and rising up in conversation.

Commenting as a sales tool is less effective than it once was, back when people still asked, “What’s a blog?” Commenting doesn’t sell, though it can hurt you if you’re a dick. Some commenters never communicate human warmth. They think their intellect and snark will win people over and drag eyeballs back to their own dead blogs. They’re wrong. We only go back to their blogs to see if they’re rude to everyone (yes, always, yes) and make mental notes of what books not to buy.

Living sales platforms are conversations.

Facebook is a bigger sales engine at the moment, coming at you sideways, fun and friendly and under your defences.  We tell stories in conversation with friends. That’s where the connection lies, even if it’s a lie. We share our failures and hopes and dreams and we don’t look at our watch when we’re on Facebook. (That’s how the wasted hours slip away and books don’t get written, too.)

Facebook falls short in some ways, but that’s where I can talk with Hugh Howey or Chuck Wendig or Robert J. Sawyer. Facebook is alive with conversation. That’s the hot, three-pronged brain plug of connection we crave.

So who cares about this shit? Too long to read. Meet me on Facebook and maybe we’ll connect in a conversation. Blogs are dead. I killed it. Just now. I regret nothing.

Season 2 is the quest.

Season 2 is the quest.

~ There is a secret in This Plague of Days. You’ve already read it. No one has guessed it yet. If you suspect you know, DM me on Facebook or DM me on Twitter. Praise and adulation will be heaped upon those who guess correctly. First prize is a signed paperback. Three winners will appear in my next book. Adulation for all will happen on the All That Chazz podcast.

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Filed under: author platform, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

08/07/2013 • 2:11 PM 7

Combat the horrors of self-promotion (with fun)

Recently an article appeared in The Weeklings that was picked up by Salon. It was called The Horrors of Self-promotion by author Sean Beaudoin. I felt sorry for the author and, I admit, a touch of impatience, too. His problem is not unique. Most of us suffer hypothermia from a lack of limelight heat. I have the feeling he doesn’t read this blog. Alas. His best marketing so far was complaining about marketing and getting picked up by Salon. I don’t know how many more times that will work since I’ve seen this kind of story on Salon before. Repeatedly!

So, to solutions:

You know that rule about writing a book that states: If you’re bored, readers are bored? Same goes for self-promotion. Find a way to get them invested. Yes, give stuff away! Reward them for being helpful. Helping others helps you and never hurts. (That link will show you how to get stuff by reposting a video from my author site.)

Joanna Penn calls authors helping authors “coopetition”. That sums up why I do podcasts with authors, for instance. Besides, we’re in a lonely profession. It’s fun to talk to like-minded people like Hugh Howey, Jessica McHugh and Armand Rosamilia.)

If you hate Twitter, you won’t use it right. It’s supposed to be a fun, social discovery tool. If you hate Facebook, maybe it’s not the place for you. Those are supposed to be friends and fans you’re hanging out with. These are platforms to discover cool stuff and have conversations. I often can’t converse for long, so usually I choose to tweet useful information. (Follow me @rchazzchute and I’ll prove it.) However, there are plenty more options, both DIY and getting assistance.

We’re writers! We’re creative people. Find a way to have fun with promotions!

1. I’ve said this many times, but it bears repeating: The writing comes first. Social media is for in-between times that would otherwise be unproductive. Most of my tweeting happens from my iPod for that reason. If I’m at my desktop, I’m writing and revising Season Two.

2. For most authors, working with a publicist doesn’t make sense. However, if you really hate promoting books, maybe you should consider how you can farm it out. Can’t afford a publicist? Start with Fiverr.com. My buddy Jeff Bennington has a post about that here. Need more? Outsource or get an intern with whom you can teach and share. Contact your local college or get on Kijiji and find someone who needs experience in your subject or business.

(Please note: It’s not an internship if they aren’t learning anything. Interns don’t do laundry and are not slaves. They learn writing skills, gain publishing information and an important, perhaps first, entry for their resume. That said, if you’re predisposed to go this route, you’ll probably learn tech skills from them, too.)

3. Work with the platform that suits you best. Every day someone repins the cover to my book Self-help for Stoners on Pinterest. I do no other promotion for that book (since I still don’t have time to get it out from under Bookbaby’s distribution yet.) It’s passive, but the word spreads and it sells despite my lack of effort beyond Pinterest and Vine. (Vine’s discussed in #10.)

4. Some people over-correct and fail to promote at all. Maybe that’s shyness, although most authors who make a point of telling you how awful social media is are snobs. Mostly, they’re really complaining about a personal time management issue. We all have the same amount of time: 24 hours in a day. Use it right, don’t complain and reread Item #1. 

5. Some authors are snobs about social media because they’re tired of all the bad promotion that happens on Twitter. They need to exercise more patience, but they aren’t wrong, either. (See my post below, Book Marketing Top 10: When Less is More and tweet to content, not sales links!)

6. Don’t go into denial. Someone said their readers don’t hang out on social media. One in four people worldwide are on social networks and more than half of North Americans are on social media. That number will only grow. If your readers aren’t on social media (Amish people and older people who frequent Renaissance fairs), you better go to them. Get a booth by the guy who sells beer but calls it mead. Compensate somehow because otherwise you’re hurting your discoverability. Go where readers are, electronically or in person.

Readers have hungry minds. Therefore, they are so on social media!

7. Write another book. Too often I speak to nice people who believe their one book should find its audience organically. However, even organic plants need water. More books give your readers more opportunities to discover your awesomeness. Do not deny them your awesomeness. That way, madness lies.

8. I’ve recently posted about the many advantages of the Author Marketing Club and the tools they make available. With their free submission tool, you can harness the power of book promotion websites without hammering your own audience repeatedly. If you’re only tweeting to your followers, you’re doing it wrong. First, write stuff that’s useful, funny or retweetable. Then get on Triberr and expand your reach.

9. Blog. I have many blogs (all listed here) and reach out to varied audiences (writers, readers, podcast lovers, polymaths, the morbidly obese and schlubs like me, just trying to get their shit together.) However, ChazzWrites is the blog with the highest Alexa score. I do them all for the fun of it. If I hated it, I wouldn’t do it. I suggest ideas and try to be useful and helpful. I often try to be funny. People who get my flavor and like the taste will click the ubiquitous links to my books. Or not. But if you don’t blog, there’s no way for anyone to get what you’re about except unconvincing sales links that mostly sound the same.

Should books sell themselves? Yes, in a perfect world. You saw the news feed this morning. Does this look like a perfect world to you?

Are there exceptions and can you do nothing and still be a hit? Sure. It happened to Hugh Howey. His success is quite organic and, of course, well-deserved. However, that’s not the way to bet. Hugh told me so himself on the Cool People Podcast. Unfortunately, the norm is that many deserving books are ignored. It’s not that many of them aren’t good or even great. It’s that no one has helped readers find them effectively. Yet!

Look, I know all you want to do is write. We all just want to write and be taken care of by legions of adoring loved ones and fans. It would be great if we all had robot butlers, too. We don’t. Grow up and find a way to have fun with your chores so they aren’t chores anymore.

10. Do something different. Twitter isn’t everything. I get love and attention using Vine, for instance. If you don’t know Vine, I wrote a book about it. Basically, it’s six-second video and it’s surprisingly fun and addictive. I can choose to post the videos only to Vine, to Facebook, to Twitter or even embed vines (videos) like these fun and/or disturbing examples. 

Find what works for you. Then go do that as much or as little as you can stand. But please, no more complaining. There’s too much fun to be had and too many options to enjoy to waste time complaining. Unless you get picked up by Salon. Then maybe that worked. Sean Beaudoin! Did that work? Are you feeling better? Let us know!

~ I’m Robert Chazz Chute because “Robert Chute” is already taken by a Native American author and poet who surely wouldn’t want to be confused with a crime novelist and horror author. I was recently challenged about why I wrote a book with zombies in it. (Well…not the Romero kind. More the 28 Days Later variety.) Anyway, I justified my love over at ThisPlagueofDays.com with this saucy post. You might enjoy that post, too. Fewer links, more sass.

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Filed under: author platform, book marketing, Publicity & Promotion, publishing, self-publishing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

04/14/2013 • 8:28 PM 5

Triberr: Problems and Solutions

A kronosaurus, the prehistoric sea monster, ate my blog traffic. Many blog subscribers will already have seen the wonderful and helpful posts listed below (even if I say so,

Kronosaurus queenslandicus

Kronosaurus queenslandicus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

my own damn self). However, due to some technical glitch with Triberr, a lot of people missed these ChazzWrites.com posts (and crucial extras, like links to my new book sites, ThisPlagueofDays.com and onlysixseconds.wordpress.com or tap the grooviness at CoolPeoplePodcast.com or hear a reading at AllThatChazz.com).

Disaster

I discovered the other day that my Triberr marketing teams haven’t been retweeting my blog posts for quite some time. Curses! Foiled again! What to do? And why is Triberr so important for bloggers, marketers, authors and, ultimately, readers?

Woe

My blog traffic and Twitter mentions had slowed remarkably. I blamed myself for a lack of awesomeness at first, of course. I mean, self-loathing? That’s just what I do! However, I put my head down, close to the keyboard, and tried to double up on the awesome. When that didn’t work, I began to look for other reasons for the aching distance between me and the popularity of Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World. Perhaps the new cologne wasn’t working out? Then I discovered the Triberr problem.

Frustration

I’d been diligently retweeting the best of the tweets from my tribes (and I’m in awesome tribes with wonderful bloggers and writers). However, my blog posts weren’t getting sent out to their followers in turn.

As soon as I discovered the problem was somewhere in Triberr settings, I tried to solve it myself. Result: Failure.

Then I asked for tech support from Triberr. I received no response.

I waited several days, became impatient, sent another plea for help and…still didn’t hear from tech support.

Then I figured out what was missing and finally fixed it myself yesterday.

However, I come to praise Triberr, not to bury it.

This is not an indictment of Triberr, but when it didn’t work recently, the social media marketing tool certainly showed me its value. Good posts get more hits, anyway, but they get even more traffic with a boost from Triberr. Without Triberr, I’m not spreading the word as effectively. With Triberr, my reach is, theoretically, 6 million people plus whoever the 6 million retweets to. That’s a lot of eyeballs coming here to taste my flavor, fall in like, buy some books and tumble into full-force love. 

Now that the problem is fixed, my traffic stats are bouncing back up. My Twitter connections are ablaze again. Soon, this very post will be sent out through the cyber-ether by my tribes and who knows where it will land, or how many new subscribers and Twitter followers I’ll gain? (Crosses fingers, strangles a mime for good luck.)

People appreciate value and boy, do I try to give it. However, hiding our lights under  cliched bushels and waiting for it to happen magically and organically doesn’t help new readers discover us quickly. Triberr gives more people the chance to fall in love with what we can provide. Where else are you going to read about publishing and mime-stangling? See? I’m so unique.

Triberr helps.

And usually? Triberr works

.

In case you missed my redesign of this blog, thoughts on optimizing books and sales, podcasts, announcements and changes in publishing strategies, here are some those articles. Also, please enjoy the odd mime-strangling. (Don’t do it every day, though. If it’s every day, it’s not a treat.)

Odd and Unfamiliar Literary Genres

Book Marketing Problems and Solutions

Amazon Goodreads. Mostly? So What? 

How to End a Chapter: Shorter Chapters, Better Books

On Writing Well: The Challenge of the Slow Open

Ebook: What Makes a Good Cover? What Makes a Bad One?

Rebelmouse: How I got all my blogs and podcast on one glorious page

The All That Chazz Podcast: More Fury

Amazon Throttled

Getting a Bigger Boat: Adapting to be a More Effective Publisher

Writers: Shorter is Better

Blog Comment Rules and How to Become Batman

What Jedis Know About Fear

Author Platform: Problems, Solutions and Stuffed Speedos

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Filed under: blogs & blogging, book marketing, ebooks, publishing, Rant, Triberr, Writers, writing tips, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

03/17/2013 • 1:55 PM 8

Rebelmouse Review: How to Gain Readers and Listeners with a Collage of You

Click it to grab it. Just 99 cents!

Click it to grab it. Just 99 cents!

My author platform is a sprawl of social media. I’m bringing my voice to a more effective public address system with Rebelmouse.

Recently a social media expert told an author to bring two blogs together, amalgamated to one site for better SEO. That way, more people would discover her awesomeness. The problem resonated with me. I have (deep breath) three WordPress blogs, two podcasts, three Twitter feeds, a tumblr site, a Facebook page, Google+, a Pinterest board and occasionally I send out a SONAR pulse from my one-man attack submarine. I wondered, how could I possibly bring everything together without becoming some expensive programmer’s buttockal pain? I wanted to curate all my content so my readership and podcast listeners could hit the highlights in one convenient place and receive one harmonic signal. Tough problem. I now have an easy answer, and it doesn’t include hiring a programmer I can’t afford. In fact, the solution was free. It’s me on Rebelmouse.

Showcase pics and vids

You’ll notice at the top left there’s a new Rebelmouse follow  button. Please click it for The Full Chazz Experience. It’s free and ready for your unending delight. As for signing up to curate your own stuff, you can pay for premium services at Rebelmouse (starting at $9.99 a month). I opted for free now and may upgrade later. When you go to my page, it looks remarkably like a Pinterest board. The difference is, Rebelmouse pulls the feeds from the far reaches of my book and podcast empire (mmmkay, tiny kingdom) so you get the latest from the All That Chazz podcast, The Cool People Podcast, ChazzWrites.com, AllThatChazz.com, my primary Twitter feed (@rchazzchute), Facebook and Pinterest. I even added a few videos from YouTube, which, until now, most of my readers were unaware I even made. That’s the power of Rebelmouse.

Advantages for selling books

The move to Rebelmouse was especially important to me so I could show off the work and play I do with the Vine app. I make announcements about my books and podcasts on Vine amongst quick videos of our skinny pigs chattering and having fun as a six-second comedian. I wrote an instant ebook about Vine (Six Seconds, The Unauthorized Guide to How to Build Your Business with the Vine App). I wanted to draw more attention to the book and show the fun I was having with the app all in one place. Potential readers could see what I was so enthused about in Six Seconds and I could help them with the decision to buy my book and join up by showing them vines (that’s videos made on Vine). Traffic to AllThatChazz.com shot up since I joined Vine so there’s definitely value there (and the book’s just 99 cents on Amazon, by the way. Please and thank you.)

Pros

I’ve already noticed another increase in visitors since adding Rebelmouse. One easy curation page obviously makes it much easier for readers to consume my content. You can also share your offerings on Rebelmouse back to your networks. When visitors arrive to check out one offering, they can quickly check out what else is on display and get my flavor. That’s a funnel and funnels are valuable in building an audience and getting fans who buy all your books.

The front page on Rebelmouse even has further curation options. You can click on the tabs at the top so you only see the podcast page, books page or Pinterest page. (These pages were suggested by Rebelmouse based on the tags in my feed content.) Comparisons to Pinterest are obvious, except it’s a collage of the Magic that is You instead of a collage of the things you like. The beauty of this solution is an attractive page with everything in one place that’s easy to take in. When you click on the link, you’re whisked back to the original page. Not many authors are on Vine yet and very few are on Rebelmouse (I noticed Jane Friedman is there, for one). The time to get in early on these tech solutions and enhance your author platform is now.

Cons

I did have a glitch or two when I put the page up but I figured it out pretty quickly. Be careful about which feeds you authorize and be hesitant to hit the auto-update when it is offered. That got overwhelming when everything came in at once. I clicked on auto-update and then couldn’t figure out how to switch it back. I also changed the name of the page to my name (rather than confuse readers with another All That Chazz page.) That change messed up my first announcement link so eager readers got a “404, Page not found error” when they tried to follow. That fixed, I’d say most of Rebelmouse’s interface is fairly intuitive and I really like the page now.

There are certain posts I’d like to be sticky at the top, but that might be a premium feature in my future. The Pinterest look is effective, but if you never or rarely use pictures or video on your posts, it won’t work so well for readers. Like Vine, Rebelmouse is a visual medium first and text comes second. That’s fine. We’re visual creatures. Your future boyfriend or girlfriend across the dance floor might have a great sense of humour and a powerful intellect, but your first impression is eyes, hair, cheekbones, build and how well they fit in those jeans as they do the funky chicken.

Conclusions

Rebelmouse looks great for authors, photographers, musicians, graphic artists and anyone who wants a more social pitch site (compared to a pricier, upscale, hard sell, sales site like Crushpath). As we continue to search for new ways for authors to find readers (and help readers find us), Rebelmouse is one easy way. It’s the free solution I was looking for to create a magazine experience of all that I offer in one convenient page.

Book promotion and marketing is damn tough. It just got a little easier to curate ourselves in a happy way.

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Filed under: author platform, book marketing, podcasts, Publicity & Promotion, publishing, rebelmouse, Vine, web reviews, What about Chazz?, What about you?, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

02/08/2013 • 10:55 AM 5

#VINE: A new way to use #VIDEO to get new readers & listeners

Tips and inspiration for the indie author's journey to publication.

Tips and inspiration for the indie author’s journey to publication.

What’s Vine? It’s video Twitter. Make a six-second movie and spread your word. I’m all over this and I’m telling you now as your fellow author and good buddy, get in early. Not a lot of authors are there yet, so join me, join the fun and build your platform, too. It’s a fun tool and toy. We need tools like this to muster more promo mojo and muscle our way into minds. I’ll explain why we need Vine to build our book cults.

I’ve used Vine so far to let people know about my podcast and books, but also just to let people know I can be witty in six-second bites. I hope they’ll conclude I’m worth more of their time in other media. (Oh, and not for nothin’, the new free All That Chazz podcast is gripping. The What’s Uncool Edition is available to your ears here and now.) 

Why video? Video and audio are easier for people to consume than books. Yes, there are still actual readers out there, but to stick a barbed hook in an eyeball, we have to reach out to them where they are. If rabid video consumers aren’t already readers, don’t complain. Convert them to your cult.

I expect objections from a few.

There’s a neo-Luddite reflex in many authors that says:

1. “I shouldn’t have to do this!”

Waaah! I don’t want to floss, either. However, I like my teeth. Besides, if you do it right, marketing and promotion can actually be fun and productive.

2. “Here’s another piece of technology that takes us away from books!”

Here’s another piece of technology to attract new readers to your books.

3. “Video is the death of literature!”

Video is another medium. People who really love reading books will still make time for reading books.

4. “Real book lovers won’t be watching six-second video loops of cats playing.”

Have you ever met a bibliophile? Your demographic loves cats to the point it may be unhealthy. “Real” book lovers have varied interests because, mostly, they’re intelligent. 

5. “This is yet another promotional thing to spam and annoy people.”  

Not if you’re clever and fun. (Are you saying you aren’t clever and fun? Get off my blog! You can’t possibly be a friend or fan of mine!)

6. “I don’t know…sounds hard.”

Check it out. It’s easy, intuitive and took the shortest time to set up than anything else I’ve ever set up. Vine is definitely worth the minor time investment and it’s free. You will need an iPad, iPhone or iPod. I use an iPod because it’s the cheapest option that makes my life better. If I couldn’t do that, I’d borrow an Apple device from a friend once a week for a few minutes.

7. “But how will people find it?”

It not only works like Twitter, it’s integrated with Twitter and Facebook.

8. “But what can you do in only six seconds?”

Remember when I told you the story about the editor who said of Twitter, “I can’t say anything of value in 140 characters.” Translation: She was telling the world she was a lousy editor. Lots of people manage it so we can, too.

9. “I heard Vine is just filled with porn.”

They had issues with pornography but Apple made Vine’s developers scrub it. That end of the story got a lot of media coverage as Vine launched. That was last week. That data is out of date.

10. “I’m already on too many social media and can’t take the time.”

To the second point, it’s six seconds. You can spare six seconds. (Okay, maybe it takes me a minute and six seconds to get it right and post it.)

Aspire to Inspire eBook JPGAs for being on too many social media platforms: Evaluate what’s working and delete what isn’t. For instance, if you’re not looking for a job, dump LinkedIn. I did.

We call them platforms because that’s where we climb up to speak to a larger crowd. Do it and, if you’re tragically unsexy like me, do what I do and let puppets do the talking.

As soon as you download the app and get set up, find me, follow me and show me your videos. It will be great to put voices and faces to all of you. Without video, I’m just imagining you’re all lingerie-clad Angelina Jolies, Joan Chens and Beyonces. Even the guys. Especially the guys.

~ Robert Chazz Chute writes suspense, crime novels, quirky self-help fiction and writing and publishing guides. He’s wearing a black fedora and flannel pajamas right now. With cartoon moose on those pjs, ladies! He also hosts the All That Chazz podcast.
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Filed under: author platform, book marketing, podcasts, Vine, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

02/04/2013 • 8:21 AM 6

How to stop hurting yourself on #Twitter

I’m in a bind. I hate scolds, but occasionally I fall into that category. Usually, I stay silent when a righteous rebuke is all lined up for the tee off. Not today.

CASUAL INDIGNITIES AT THE MALL

When the cashier at A&W refers to the restaurant as “the store” and my dinner as “your chicken product”, I’m embarrassed to be there. I bite my tongue and swear again I’ll learn how to cook.

When I redeem  a lotto ticket and the counter guy says, “You’re a gambler! Come around to this counter, not that one!” Even though no one else is in the store (and, no matter what, I AM F#$@!%! NEXT!) I say, “Sure.” Then I walk around to the other counter. The controlling nit doesn’t move. I get a lousy two bucks and my dose of humiliation. I swear never to return to this inconvenience store and never again shall I lay eyes on the smug bonehead who runs his petty fiefdom with an iron fist of passive aggression. 

I try to be a nice guy. But the rage…these urges. No wonder I write about killing people. Crime fiction is my passive aggression at work.

BUT NOW…THE CALL TO END TWITTER PROMO MADNESS

It’s time to assert. I try to appear somewhat adorable and mask my true whiny/murderous nature, but the time to stay silent and patient has passed. I’ve asked this before. I’ve reasoned and cajoled. I’ve stopped short of insisting. I said please and thank you. I’ve led, but few followed. It’s time to say it again and to get tougher:

Authors, stop just tweeting Amazon links! Please!  Stop it!

Okay, there are times to do it. If you’re launching a book or doing something different and new, fine. Free days on Amazon spawn a lot of lookalike tweets and we can’t help that. Tweet away! I don’t believe in spam per se, but I do believe in dumb and dumb is dangerous.

It is, of course, entirely up to you what you decide to commit on social media. However…

I’M STEPPING UP BY STEPPING DOWN

I won’t be retweeting those repetitive tweets from now on. To interest readers, you need to offer fresh content and many of my fellow aspirants aren’t doing that. The practice does not help your book and it hurts my Twitter following. I have to tweet content, not air to grow my cult. You do, too.

I’ve retweeted many authors, happily and generously. Well…lately it’s been less happy because I’m too often asked to sow the same seeds in the same field. That’s not healthy for us or the crops. And consumers? They hate it. It tastes like rerun roadkill when they see the same tweet repeatedly. Grow your reader farm: Tweet and retweet more randomly.

Book promotion laziness has fallen into too many Twitter streams. For instance, how about more of a clue what your book is about and/or what genre it is? I know it’s only 140 characters, so be clever and craft your message so we understand. Use hashtags or a short quote. Telling is not selling.

Not everybody’s on board with using fresh, imaginative tweets to seduce new readers so I must participate less. It should be that the more I take part, the more followers I gain. I don’t see that in my stats at the moment.

WHAT WORKS ON TWITTER

What I see is, the more I tweet and retweet fresh content that’s funny or useful, the more followers I gain. The more I retweet stale links, the more Follow drop off I suffer. I want to help with RTs and I often do, but I won’t do so if what you want me to retweet hurts me.

HOW TWITTER FAILS AS ADVERTISING

Unless your title screams exactly what your book is about and you’re hitting the Twitter browser at just the right time, broadcasting your title and a link isn’t effective. This is exactly what it’s not like:

“Oh, there’s an Amazon link to a book called Survive Your Ambulance Ride! and I happen to be having a heart attack right now! Tis kismet! Uh-oh! I can’t feel my left arm! Quick, Helen! Before calling 911, help me click that Buy link! Good thing I have one-click buying! Um…oh, god, the blinding pain! How’s your speed reading, Helen?”

THE MYTH OF HELPFUL REPETITION

Small business owners have always been told that, for ads to be effective, they have to be seen over and over, between nine and twenty-seven times, depending on how greedy the salesperson is. The people telling them that were selling Yellow Pages advertising (or, as I now call it: Yellowed Pages.)

The Crazy Expensive Repetitive Advertising Model might even have been true then. We have more choices now. When I detect you’re trying to skate by on the same bland tweets, it feels less like a marketing plan and more like blackmail: “Buy my book and maybe I’ll stop asking you to buy my book.”

Good news: You can run as many ads for your books as you like, but bury that ad in new, better and varying content. For instance, the content always changes on this blog, but I hope my book covers at least look familiar by now, right? Right?! (What’s left of Chazz’s soul dies a little more under the crush of ice-cold anonymity.)

SOLUTION: GET SOMETHING NEW TO TWEET

Write a new blog post (with plenty of links to your books). Go ahead and go crazy. It’s your blog. Just make the posts helpful or funny and new. We all love New.

Write about the setting for your latest novel (especially if it’s exotic and you had angry monkey sex in a hot tub under a palm tree on your last vacation there.) Tell us what true events inspired you. Get on a podcast and tweet about that. Write a guest post. Reblog more for easy, fresh content your readers will appreciate (and the original blogger will thank you for.) Stop depending on the same tweet to get us to buy that same book. Change it up! Rotate tweets at least! Say something amusing, interesting, offensive, odd, surreal, whatever! Anything! Just stop pounding that same key hoping for a new note. Resolve now to tweet new stuff.

And for Thor’s sake, for readers and for your career,

write a new book!

~ Robert Chazz Chute has recoiled, turtle-like and appalled, at having published this post. He wishes it wasn’t needed. He feels bad making anyone feel bad. He’s distancing himself from this post even now by writing this in the third person. Sure, he means well, but who cares about that? You can hear his latest rant about something else entirely at the All That Chazz podcast. 

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07/28/2012 • 10:08 AM 6

Twitter Etiquette, Book Promotion & the Narcissist Inversion

How much should authors tweet to promote our books? Buckle up, because I’m about to get a little contrarian on your brain. We are told that Twitter is a conversation and if all we do is promote our books, we deserve to be unfollowed. Agreed! Let’s be clear about that. I agree. Okay? We get it!

But…there’s always a but… it’s tough to find the balance. If all you get from an author is “BUY MY BOOK!” then, yes, absolutely, the complainers are right. That’s too much. I’m not sure how they feel about all the promotion I do of other people’s books. Maybe that’s offensive to somebody, too. Anyway, work out your own cost/benefit analysis and do that UNFOLLOW math.

Now comes the contrarian counter programming: You want me to find the balance? I’m trying.

But is your view balanced?

I’m going to turn the narcissism charge around on the accusers and usual suspects for a change.

1. One person’s sensibility isn’t everyone’s sensibility. We’re taught in school to never start a rant, argument or sentence with the words, “I think.” This programs our brains to think they aren’t subjective machines. We mistake our words for universal law. I call this “King (or Queen) of the Universe Syndrome.” K(orQ)US is a common affliction which makes the afflicted think everyone should share their opinion. For example, I’m infected right now. (The only antidote I know is to go for a walk at night and look at stars.)

2. You’re telling me what to do. I don’t like to be told what to do. I’m interested in what other people think, but I like to decide things for myself. I don’t wear a collar well — everybody gets the devil’s advocate thing — but there’s a larger point: There are no rules. It’s the Internet. The only rules are in service contracts. Etiquette changes. Etiquette is not universal. Aside from the blogs of hyper-marketing gurus and scolds, we can do what we want. It’s the Old West and that’s what we love about the Internet. You and your tin badge don’t have no jurisdiction outside of town, Sheriff.

3. Twitter is a microblogging platform. People use it in all sorts of ways: to search out new customers, to find new friends, to discover grisly pictures of weird roadkill and cute baby animals. Some use it like it’s Instant Messenger. To some, a blog; to others, a flog. There’s a lot more diversity to our choices than simply insisting that people “engage” you all the time.

4. If I’m filling up your feed, you’re the narcissist for not following enough people. My incoming tweet stream is a roaring river of information, diversity and neural input. I love that. Even the most verbose can’t dominate my stream for long because I’ve got so much input coming at me from so many cool people.

5. What’s your problem? It’s free. Twitter is free and opting into someone’s stream is free. Complaining about something you got for free is beyond the “First World Problem” category. It seems rude to me.

6. The agony I’m putting you through is voluntary and your safe word is UNFOLLOW. If you are following anyone against your will, please call the police and take jujitsu so no one can snatch your autonomy from you again.

7. Just because you’re not interested, it’s not necessarily spam. It might just mean that you’re not interested. That doesn’t make all authors spammers. That makes you a Lookie-Lou. You’re a browser who has no intent to buy. What good am I doing you? What good are you doing me? What is this “Some pigs are more equal than others” con you’re trying to pull on me?

8. You’re a delicate doily. With Netflix, PVR and DVDs, the populace is trained not to sit through commercials to get to the good stuff. We used to have to sit through ads and now we don’t. (Tangent: Have ad rates come down significantly to reflect this fact?) But Twitter is not Netflix, PVR, or DVDs. It’s live people and a bunch of them are offering you the opportunity to sample their wares and delight you for hours for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. And it’s not killing you. Ignoring stuff is easy. The people who are delicate doilies stopped reading after the first paragraph of this post, for instance. They only read stuff they agree with. Hm. I should try that. It sounds peaceful.

9. You’re limiting my creativity. One morning I watched Kevin Smith’s Twitter feed fill up as he wrote a long treatise on art and aspiration. I loved it and couldn’t wait for the next tweet of argumentation and inspiration. However, some people complained he was filling up their feed. His answer was, “I’m expressing myself here! If you don’t want to read it, don’t.” That unfollow button is so darn handy.

Some people take a dim view of following too many people, but I think that means your interested in your world. However, if you’re really not interested in what someone has to say on Twitter and it offends you in some way, maybe you’re meant to follow only those for whom you’re a true fan. And if you’re a true narcissist (or weak-minded or insecure in your convictions) I suspect you follow no one on Twitter because this is Sparta and following is for sheep! Or some such macho BS.

10. To write, narcissism is necessary. It takes a truckload of delusion to write and allow the words outside of your house for others to read. Why should anyone care? Most won’t. Writing is a quixotic affliction. If we had a choice before birth, the smart babies would choose to be better at math so they could get a paying gig. Writers don’t choose writing. It chooses us. The crazy narcissism of expecting a readership to discover us? That’s what keeps us writing (and from stepping off that high ledge.)

11. We are all narcissists. All social media taps into the secret we keep from ourselves. We are all the stars of our own movies and the little people are waiting for our grand pronouncements. Let the extras eat after me. Deliver the pheasant under glass to my trailer.

12. I won’t miss you. I’m not into making rules for others, just the odd argument that is hopeless in the face of cultural entrenchment. However, if pressed for a rule it would be: When clicking unfollow, don’t tell anyone. “I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m announcing to everyone that I’m leaving! I’m taking my marbles and going home!” How petty. That’s the ultimate douchey, narcissist move.

There once was a guy who was very rude to me on Twitter. I unfollowed. I never listened to his podcast again, either, but I will never name him. I’m sure he didn’t notice my absence or care. We’re both better off.

13. You’re not engaging me in conversation, either. That’s what Facebook is for. Seriously, I have noticed that the people who insist the loudest that they be “engaged” in conversation, are waiting for me to come to them. They’ve never tried to “engage” me with anything. They don’t retweet anyone. They wouldn’t pee on me if I were on fire. They are princesses, sitting on pillows, waiting to be asked so they can experience the delight of pointing their noses at the ceiling and saying no.

14. There are too many people on Twitter to have a conversation with everyone. That’s a silly, unrealistic requirement. That’s math. If you insist I engage you constantly and personally you, who’s the narcissist?

That’s the equivalent of requiring authors to go door-to-door…and…and…hey! Waitaminute! That’s the answer! I could sell my crime novels door to door! Excuse me. Gotta run.

No, before I go pound on strangers’ doors, one more:

15. Somebody I kind of like said that the only way to sell is by not selling. To me? That seems like a slap in Art’s face. Maybe that’s shame and fear masquerading as etiquette and high-mindedness. Whenever we tweet about our books, yes, we risk turning someone off. That’s focusing on the wrong end of the equation. What about all the people turned on to our books? Don’t focus on the I Hate Everything Cult. (There’s a clue. They hate everything! They only download books for free so they can crap on the dreams we are fulfilling!)

What about readers who actually enjoy reading a good book? What about your fan base, out there somewhere, searching for you? You’ve got a Twitter beacon but they can’t find you because you’re being so darn polite, you won’t risk a shout into the darkness. You don’t want to risk annoying people who don’t care about you, anyway! Grow a spine and tweet. Yes, for the love of all that’s chocolate, balance it out as best you can, but go ahead and tweet about your book without all the worry. You won’t kill anyone. And if you do, call me. I know a guy who’s good about making bodies disappear.

Does beating Twitter followers over the head with sales offers work? No. But keeping our magnificence a secret shame sure won’t do the job, either. Authors: toughen up and find your balance. Twitter etiquette fascists: for the sake of Art and your own enjoyment, ease up and toughen up. Or get out.

~ I’m Robert Chazz Chute, the award-winning writer and author of the world’s first bathroom/marijuana/suspense/humor book Self-help for Stoners and the twistiest, funniest crime novel Bigger Than Jesus (among other things.) 

Follow me on Twitter @rchazzchute.

Or unfollow me on Twitter @rchazzchute.

 

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07/27/2012 • 6:31 PM 0

UBC #28: The zero money approach to book promotion

Small-town terrors and psychological mayhem in Maine.
Reached #18 in shorts on Amazon!

Each morning, author Al Boudreau asks a question about the writing life and publishing on Facebook. This morning, he asked which we preferred: A big launch of our books or a soft launch? Other people have their own answers. Here’s mine, as I wrote it this morning:

My short answer is: Hint and be clever about promotion rather than try to spend our way to success.

Sorry about my long answer, but it could have been even longer: I used to work in trad pub, so I kept all details secret. Now I hint and promote a bit for upcoming books (especially those in a series because, knowing it’s a series, that appeals to readers more.) The hints comprise things like the odd progress report, tweeting love and my Six Words or Less Contest in which the witty and pithy winner will have his or her name in the next book in the series. That’s really selling the foundation novel as it promotes the next one.

[Wanna play? Scroll down the page for the SIX WORDS OR LESS CONTEST. Entry deadline, July 31.>

With respect, I think there’s still a bit of inertia from old to new model with thinking in terms of a big launch. Except for ARCs to media and long lead times on seasonal books, Trad publishing is much about keeping it under wraps and then blasting PR and promotion for a short period of time (in part because they have so many other books to move on to and because the obsession is short tail vending and beating quick return deadlines in bookstores.) We’re kind of like classical music. We don’t get rock star tours and roadies, but we can sell lots in the long term because our books are available until we evolve past the Internet and start reading each other’s minds. (Or heat death and an ugly extinction, whichever comes first.)

With long tail marketing, though we don’t have the resources for a huge launch with cap displays and buying bookstore space, all our energy isn’t spent in a tiny retail window, either. Publishers have largely abandoned big launches anyway. Most midlisters never get that dreamed of release party and all their publicity is really up to authors who thought they’d get more logistical support.

Our books can go up faster with low overhead and they are on sale forever.No returns. Rather than blast potential

“You will laugh your ass off!” ~ Author of Cybrgrrl, Maxwell Cynn

readers, I hint because I wouldn’t want to tire anybody out. “Oh, there’s Chazz talking about Self-help for Stoners and Kevin Smith again,” wears me out, too (hence more books are critical.) That’s okay, though, because we’re better at social media than trad publishing has been. Social media is personality based. Who cares what Random House’s twitter is on about? I want to hear from individual authors, not faceless corporate entities. Corporations are not people, my friend.

Big launches feel like putting all the chips on one roll of the dice, which is an awful way to start your trip to Vegas. I just hint and hope the dribble never becomes an embarrassing orgiastic fit or a drone. Just my opinion as the author of the hilarious crime novel Bigger Than Jesus. (See what I did there? Um…yeah. See, there’s such a fine line between fun promotion and self-loathing.)

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07/09/2012 • 6:28 PM 1

Ultimate Blog Challenge: I was on CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup yesterday

Yesterday I spoke on national radio in Canada. The show is Cross Country Checkup on CBC Radio. I reference the show in my

English: Lion's mane jellyfish Español: Medusa...

English: Lion’s mane jellyfish Español: Medusa melena de león ártica (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

book Self-help for Stoners (it’s the last story, called Context.) I did get to plug my latest book, but I didn’t mention Context on the show, though. It wasn’t the same host. The topic was basically, Social Media: Good or Bad?

They tried to finesse it, but that was the basic, kind of clunky, out-of-date, black and white question. Thing is, I think I was in the minority in extolling the virtues of social media! I was a bit shocked about how many people called in to say how terrible social media was for the children, the zombified masses and the fate of our doomed society. After I hung up I realized that, though they did have a few social media experts to balance things out, the demographic of listeners to CBC Radio on a Sunday afternoon aren’t exactly social media mavens.

For all the hand wringing, most of the objections people raised about social media seem to come down to poor time management and either/or thinking. They couldn’t say no to their kids. They couldn’t turn it off or they were nostalgic for a time that never was.

Here’s what I said on the show (and a couple of points I didn’t get a chance to add):

1. Social media allows me to have the business I do. (Yes, here’s where the plug for Bigger Than Jesus came in.)

2. I like what social media does to my brain. More neural input leads to more complex neural output.

3. Social media allows me to meet people I never would. And I wasn’t at all social in person before. I pretend to be an extrovert here. In real life, I’m one long beard and a pack of chewing tobacco away from being a recluse.

4. My neighbours are fine people, but our relationships are infrequent and accidents of proximity. Social media gives me the tribe, followers and conversationalists I choose.

5. Get used to it. Social media is spatial displacement. I don’t have to be there to be there. Physical presence is not required. This should be obvious since I was speaking on a national phone-in show that’s broadcast around the world.

6. We are social animals. (If we weren’t, we’d be extinct.) Social media is the new place to be social. Wring your hands all you want. We aren’t going backwards. Is it just for narcissists? I’d say we are all so subjective, we are all narcissists. However, the guy who extolled the virtues of cutting himself off from the noise of social media so he could explore only what his brain could come up with? That jerk sounded like the King of the Narcissists.

7. With Twitter and Facebook, I get information pushed at me that I wouldn’t think to search for. The other day I saw a Lion’s Mane Jellyfish for the first time. (See the picture above? That’s one.) It’s amazing. It predates the dinosaurs and they are still floating around in the Arctic Ocean. Oh, yeah. Did I mention they are about the size of a huge cube van? They’re a-MAZ-ing! I ended up using a reference to the Lion’s Mane Jellyfish in my new crime thriller. (I know that sounds crazy, but you’ll get the metaphor when you read Higher Than Jesus this fall.)

8. People worry social media takes too much time. The founding fathers of the United States wrote reams and reams of letters in their lifetimes that must have taken hours out of every day. They still got a few things done, don’t you think? (You could argue that the founding fathers had slaves. True, though I read somewhere that all our modern conveniences which automate our lives so much actually replace the work of fifty slaves, so everything evens out except for the awful horror of slavery.)

9. Someone argued that social media reduces us to selling ourselves all the time. How is that different from always except we now have a more efficient way to do it? We sell ourselves, our time, our personalities to get a job, get a mate, keep a job, keep a mate and to avoid being disowned by our parents and children. Tools change quickly. We evolve slowly.

10. Social media has a tremendous power for good and just because the critics can’t handle it doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t love it and use it responsibly. Through social media I sell my books. Without social media I wouldn’t know all the cool people I know. Were it not for social media, I would not have been privileged to participate in a campaign to help a young man suffering leukaemia with his medical bills. (I wouldn’t even have known about his struggle in the first place.)

I probably irritated some CBC listeners because

Get Bigger Than Jesus

I was one of the few who weren’t worried about the damage social media can do.

It will make them feel better to know that my appearance didn’t help me sell a single book.

So much for moving that needle.

(UBC #13 of 31)

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06/30/2012 • 7:50 PM 2

Social media: Twitter Etiquette & Maybe Myths

 

Get Bigger Than Jesus

We’re told content is king, one-to-one engagement is paramount and direct messages on Twitter are rude. Maybe not. Before you swallow somebody else’s rules, we need to be careful we aren’t hiding our lights under bushels again. As the resident introvert pretending to be an extrovert, I’m not suggesting “rules” here. I’m suggesting not all rules are for everybody all the time. Question the rules and let’s rethink what’s rude when you’re on Twitter. Let’s examine the self-appointed arbiters’ assumptions about marketing manners with some Maybe Myths. I may not change your mind with this contrarian post, but I’ll be happy you made up your own mind.

Maybe Myth 1: Content is king.

Sin: Last week I promoted more authors than ever through Twitter. In return, they promoted my new books, Bigger Than Jesus and The Dangerous Kind & Other Stories. The Tweet Teams at World Literary Cafe and me friends at Triberr helped sell books. It’s a tricky balance, figuring out how much to tweet, how much to retweet and how much to engage. I thought I was risking my follower count by tweeting a drumbeat of, “Buy my book! Buy these books!” I promoted others more than myself, but it was still a big stack of book flogging. It was, you might well argue, what many people object to when they think of desperate authors trying to get attention and yell past the ambient sound.

Redemption: Or, if you think of it differently, it’s helping out and giving more people more opportunities to discover cheap entertainment they might otherwise have missed. Silence or too much self-conscious inhibition would not have connected with people or moved any books. Besides, my numbers of Twitter followers increased with this promotional campaign. No, don’t harangue anyone, but don’t be so shy, either. Be proud. Assert. Declare. Let yourself be known.

Maybe Myth 2: Engagement is queen. 

Sin: You can’t get more followers, and you don’t deserve more followers, unless you engage with people. “Twitter is a conversation,” the gurus say. I think that’s often right, but what I did last week wasn’t much of a conversation. The signal went out, not back and forth.

Redemption: I want to be clear: I remember my pleases and my thank yous. I do engage with people on Twitter a few times a day. I’ll respond to a question or a comment here and there. However, I follow 2,000 interesting people on just one of three Twitter accounts. How much real engagement is logistically or reasonably possible to expect?

Before you answer, “So follow fewer people”, nope! I follow a lot of people for all that great neural input. Information and joke tweets stimulate my brain and I want to keep my brain stimulated. I value their tweets and all that fresh data.

3. Maybe Myth 3: Everyone’s a delicate little princess.

Sin: Some people object to auto-tweets welcoming new followers because they think direct messages to strangers are rude and bot tweets suck. (Who handed down that law to begin with, anyway?)

Redemption: I’d argue that if you follow somebody, it indicates a good faith act that you don’t want to be just strangers. You might not have them over for a barbecue yet, but the condemnation of a friendly, welcoming auto-tweet with a little more about me, my website and my book babies seems a wild overreaction. Please  don’t go to Defcon 1 and condemn one auto-tweet with the same vehemence as world hunger or skinning live puppies.

Some people complain welcoming auto-tweets are annoying. I think that’s a very vocal minority, probably the same subset of people who insist on validating Twitter accounts. I don’t do that, either. I tried it and it was cumbersome and if somebody’s that stiff and vituperative about a simple follow, they probably aren’t my crowd. I’ve had followers thankme for letting them know I have books (of Doom!) and podcasts (of Doom!) that they may want to check out. One person’s spam is another person’s tasty meat product in a can.

Small-town terrors and psychological mayhem in Maine.

More about the auto-tweet debate: Consider the case of Claude Bouchard, a brilliant author, who uses Twitter very effectively. I know this because his following is closing in on 273,000 people. Um. Wow. In a recent post, How I Really Got a 1/4 million Twitter Followers, he explained that he takes a few minutes each day to unfollow the people who don’t climb aboard his party boat to make room for people who get him. Click that blog post link for more information on his strategy and thinking. I would not presume to summarize it here. (You could also set TweetAdder to take care of unfollows and other tasks automatically, though Mr. Bouchard doesn’t trust such bots and does it manually.)

I read someone condemn the welcoming tweet idea as useless. My answer: Do you have half as many Twitter followers? Have you sold as many books? Then maybe Mr. Bouchard has something to teach, not learn. I’m glad I ran across his post.

Think you’ve heard it all? I’ve watched a couple of people on Twitter castigate someone who dared to hit “reply” to one of their tweets. These dicks, a couple of celebs so minor as to be nearly microscopic, took the minimalist  approach to Twitter engagement and made up a new rule: How dare you speak to someone you don’t even know? (Answer: um, so we might get to know each other?) For these guys, Twitter is a place for everyone to sit quietly while they talked. I think applause was allowed, as long as it was quiet golf green applause. You can monologue on podcasts, but when people declare that Twitter is only for people who already know each other? Really? Isn’t that what email is for? Unfollowed.

To the vocal minority: I make free podcasts, free blog posts (that are usually wittier, far less cranky and more fun than this one), cheap but pretty damn awesome books and give friendly-but-not-needy engagement to my Twitter friends. That ought to suffice, shouldn’t it? Sorry if I annoyed you last week, but if it did annoy you, apparently you were a small group and, respectfully, I hope you unfollowed so I won’t bother you further. I don’t want to bother anyone. Let’s just keep things in perspective. Twitter is free and you don’t have to listen to anyone you don’t want to listen to. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You no like? Unfollow. Don’t tell me you’re unfollowing. Just do it, no hard feelings. Not everybody likes mocha coffee. Crazy, but true.

What some people call spam, others thank you for. I fractured the royal rules and made them into Maybe Myths, gained more Twitter followers, helped a bunch of readers and writers connect, and sold some books. And not just my books, either. Maybe the Internet scolds need to reconsider the accepted dogma. I’m going to continue to let people know about my books as they keep coming. Lots of people seem to appreciate that. Those who do board my party boat and go for a fun fiction cruise with me have no idea how grateful I am for their enthusiasm and support.

Truly. Thank you.

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http://mybook.to/OurZombieHours
A NEW ZOMBIE ANTHOLOGY

Winner of Writer's Digest's 2014 Honorable Mention in Self-published Ebook Awards in Genre

The first 81 lessons to get your Buffy on

More lessons to help you survive Armageddon

"You will laugh your ass off!" ~ Maxwell Cynn, author of Cybergrrl

Available now!

Fast-paced terror, new threats, more twists.

An autistic boy versus our world in free fall

Suspense to melt your face and play with your brain.

Action like a Guy Ritchie film. Funny like Woody Allen when he was funny.

Jesus: Sexier and even more addicted to love.

You can pick this ebook up for free today at this link: http://bit.ly/TheNightMan

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Brain Spasms a la Twitter

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