Self-Publishing and Twitter: Does It Help Your Book Sales?
The nature of this business is to write and sell your books — this much any writer will agree upon. The focus of your business is to build enough momentum so that you will be able to sell more of your books over time and will not need to write as often or as much to make money.
This is not to suggest that you won’t write but that you will have more free time to write what you enjoy. In this regard being on social networking sites such as Twitter will help.
With this in mind, how does a social network- with many writers on it- such as Twitter help your book sales? You’d like people to buy your book, and hopefully read it, but does Twitter help?
Yes, and no.
That’s not the answer you were expecting was it? There are many ways to promote and make people aware of your book…. and then there is Twitter- a 140 character writing challenge.
Twitter is a reasonably quick and easy platform to get your name out there-provided you can take it long term. Most authors post on Twitter and most readers have heard about it. It’s a pretty big place and you can get lost there. Between making a book known to a large network, and making a name for yourself, it’s almost a full time job.
Sure, you have self-publised a book. (I have a book on Amazon, and while it’s my “baby” I still have to write other things to create more income.) As a writer who needs money, you need people to buy and read it, and Twitter can be an avenue to reach that audience.
The problem is that also takes a bit of Twitter’s own magic to get you there. You will need to have enough people re-tweeting your tweets to have any chance of success on this social network.
Yes, you have a chance to make a name for yourself, but does it give you a great chance to generate books sales? For the sake of sanity, the answer is no. You might be surprised by this, but if you don’t have a good following and aren’t willing to spend time to build your network you won’t have a chance. You might end up with sales, but it’s more likely that you won’t, because it is not a medium where you can get away with simply having an account and posting tweets.
It’s definitely more than that. You have to engage your readers as you would anywhere else. If you don’t, nothing you do can increase sales — tweet all you like but if the people who follow you don’t care, it won’t matter.. You do have to have a personality and a love for interaction and writing. Not everyone is famous.
You can use Twitter to increase sales, just like any of the many social networking sites out there, but to seriously make money there, you will have to interact and be a person people want to find out more about.
