Twitter Etiquette For Authors

Twitter is a wonderful place to promote your book, but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. To avoid making mistakes that might cause you to lose readers and fans, check out the following list of do’s and dont’s:

Do: Reply to messagesRemember that you’re not a celebrity. It’s unlikely that you’re contacted by so many people in a day that you just can’t keep up. While there may be some authors who just can’t respond to everyone, they are few and far between. Interacting with your fans is important. When they write you they’re most likely telling you how much they enjoyed your work or have a question to ask you. Thanking them is the least that you can do.

Don’t: Market every 5 minutesChances are you’ve followed an author who promotes their book every few minutes. It’s annoying, right? The most obvious problems with promoting your book every couple of minutes it that it fills up people’s timelines and may cause them to unfollow you or they simply don’t even pay attention to your tweets anymore. Don’t schedule tweets to post every 3 or 5 minutes. If you need to schedule your tweets because you won’t be around for a while, make sure that you space them appropriately.

Do: Respond to other people’s tweetsTwitter is all about interaction. It’s important that you respond to tweets. If someone tweets about your book, you should respond to it, favorite it, and/or retweet it. You don't have to respond to every tweet, but anything you find interesting you should reply to (whether it's about your book, or someone else's). Everyone likes to know that people are not only reading their tweets, but getting something out of them as well.

Don’t: Follow thousands to get followersIf you are going to follow a large number of people, make sure that they’re in some way related to your interests. If you’ve written a mystery book, you probably want to follow other mystery writers. Of course, you don’t only need to follow people in your particular genre, but make sure you have interest in their work. Following random people will more likely bring you random followers instead of people who are interested in your work. It’s better to have 500 followers who are interested in you and your work than 5,000 who aren't interested at all.

Twitter is a great place for authors to promote their work, but it’s important to realize that more goes into promoting your work than bombarding people with links to your work. Doing that might actually harm your sales, rather than help.