I had a great time at the DFW Writers Conference this weekend. I attended informative workshops on the publishing industry, social media, writing for young adults (even though I can't imagine any of my books ever being shelved in YA, but Rosemary Clement-Moore is witty and fun to listen to), how to get over writer's block (which I've never had, but like Rosemary, Candace Havens is fun to listen to). Many of the workshops I attended discussed the Internet as it related to publishing and writing, and the buzzword
du jour was Twitter.
I like Twitter. I've bought books based on Twitter recommendations and because I follow published authors, and it's a great way for authors to connect with readers and other writers. My agent uses it to keep up with her clients, and it also lets us know what she's up to, if she'll be unavailable for some time, if she's backlogged, etc. And it's a way to get to know her other clients, writers who share a common interest.
In the workshop on social media, someone gave a brief presentation on how he was using Twitter to increase his nonfiction platform. But he made what I consider a glaring error when he admitted he only followed people to get them to return the favor, while at the same time admitting he had no interest in what they had to say. (But I do want to point out in the interest of fairness he does have friends he tracks; it's just that a lot of his peeps are only being followed so they'll return the favor).
Here's the thing with Twitter. Even if you follow someone, they don't
have to follow you back. And if you follow me and everyone else on the damn planet, if I don't know you, I'm not returning the favor. I figure you probably don't care what I have to say. At the time of this post, I'm following 83 people. That's about 8 more than I find easy to keep track of, and I'll soon need to go through and cull people who haven't updated in weeks, people whose posts are primarily advertisements, and people who never bother to reply to conversations.
But I actually do follow those 83 people. At the conference, I met two people I only knew through Twitter, and made two more Twitter friends in the process. One of my deciding factors on whether to follow someone is to see how often they respond to people who @reply to them (in other words, replying directly to someone). If their posts are always "I did this," and "I did that," and "Buy this from me," but never acknowledging anyone else's feeds, I have zero interest in you. Why should I? You have enough interest in yourself for the both of us.
Twitter is a lot of fun. It's extremely powerful (as Domino's and Amazon recently found out), and it works. (Aside, after actress Felicia Day, who has over 500,000 followers at the time of this post, made a Tweet about a writer's book, the writer had 10,000 hits to the Amazon link to her book. Hits don't equal sales, but even a 10% purchase rate would be fantastic). http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2009/04/power-of-twitter.html). I've met some wonderful people and seen some fascinating conversations. But like all forms of communication, it should be a give-and-take process.
Labels: publishing, Twitter, writing