Social Media Archives - Suns Golden Ray Publishing

Posted on December 11, 2017December 5, 2017 by Whitney Evans

Using Compile Presets in Scrivener

Scrivener is a wonderful program many writers use to set up and manage their books, screenplays, and research projects. Nearly every aspect of the program can be customizable, from the drafting settings to the export format. But with so many options, many authors find themselves overwhelmed. To that end, we’re posting a blog series on our favorite features of Scrivener. Today, we’re going to cover how to use compile presets in Scrivener, including some tips and tricks to set you up for success.

Note: The screenshots are for Scrivener 2.0. for Mac. We hear from our friends at Literature and Latte that version 3.0 is coming soon, and when we get access to it, we’ll update this post.

What is a Compile Preset?

A Compile Preset is exactly what it sounds like – a pre-selected group of compile settings that you can use and reuse. In other words, you can have a setting for paperback to keep your margins and font size the same, one for hardcovers, one for Kindle, etc. There are two kinds: Project Presets and Global Presets.

Project Presets are saved settings only available in a single file. We like to keep our series books in a single file, then create project presets for each format. The settings for Razia aren’t available in the Madion Trilogy, for example.

Global presets, on the other hand, are available across all Scrivener projects. This is a good way to keep your general settings for paperbacks and hardcovers consistent. You can create a new project preset starting from the global preset, or keep your oft-used presets, like exporting a clean .docx to your editor.

Project Preset Tips

Once upon a time, we did a print run of one of our books. All was well until we opened up the first page and saw our headers showed the wrong book title.

Truly. There were thirty books in that print run.

Ever since then, we’ve made it a habit to create separate print settings for every book. That way, we’re absolutely sure we’re printing the right book. Also, our hardcover formatting differs (usually) from the paperback formatting, so having those separate presets is convenient. For example: when you have updates to back matter, you don’t have to spend time trying to guess what the margins were. Your books will be consistent every time.

Just make sure you double check those headers.

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Posted on August 14, 2017July 14, 2017 by Whitney Evans

Your Book Marketing Questions: Answered!

The past few weeks, we’ve been sharing all our knowledge about different social media channels and how best to use them to grow your audience. We’ve talked about in-person events too, and how to manage old and new media. To wrap up this series, we wanted to open the floor to your most confounding book marketing questions.

Thanks to our friends in all the author groups for providing the questions.

My book was downloaded 2000 times and I only got 2 reviews. Help?

Reviews are hard. In the first place, people have to remember to add in text with their little stars. Then they have to cross post it. Nobody has time for that. But also, you shouldn’t be measuring reviews by free downloads.

This boils down to understanding your audience. If you’re doing an eBook blast on BookBub or the like, those readers are the voracious ones that read 1-2 books per day. These guys aren’t slowing down for anything, let alone writing a five-word review.

For these folks, you measure success by how many of Book 2 and beyond you sell. If you got 200 downloads of book 2, then you’re rocking a 10% read-through-rate. That’s awesome, because most folks are doing well at 3%.

Instead of looking for reviews from your eBook ads, you should be focusing on the casual reader, who does have time to stop and write a short blurb. This is where soft selling comes into play, as well as a street team, if you have one.

I did everything you said, and my book still didn’t sell and lost money!

Everything? You did everything? Even we don’t do everything. There’s just not enough time in the day for it all.

My advice if your book isn’t selling is to look at a few different factors. First: Are we talking a series or a standalone? Depending on the genres, standalones can be harder to market. If you’re talking about a series, understand that indie publishing isn’t a bell curve, where all the sales you’re ever going to make are during release week. For indies, it’s more like an exponential curve. Our experience is that books don’t take off until you’ve got at least three books published in the series.

The other thing to do is to take a good, hard look at how your marketing your book. Are you creating relationships with the right influencers? Did you spend the money on a good cover? A good editor? Are you posting good content on a regular basis to social media? Are you interacting with your fans? Have you looked into eBook ads and gauged performance? Have you benchmarked with other authors in your genre?

See what we mean about everything? There’s probably one or two things you can tweak to improve where you are. And if all else fails, there’s one way to sell more books: Write another one.

How do I promote a book that doesn’t fit into a specific category?

No matter the book, no matter the product, no matter the industry: Soft-selling works. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if a book doesn’t fit into a specific category, your method for growing your audience should be exactly the same. Find readers who like things similar to your book and build a relationship with them! Your book is unique, but it’s not that unique. Somewhere out there, another author has something out there that’s got themes and ideas similar to yours. Find them, and then get to work on getting to know those fans.

This is also where Amazon’s keywords come in handy. You can use words and phrases in your seven keywords that more accurately describe your book, and make sure it fits into the right category on the search results.

Got more book marketing questions? Sound off in the comments!

Or, if you’d rather get a one-on-one session, we offer consulting services for authors. At just $6.25 for every 15 minutes, we can help you do everything from clean up your social media to fix the SEO on your blog. Contact us via the form below for more info!

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Posted on July 31, 2017April 3, 2018 by Whitney Evans

Your Author Brand – Your Reputation on the Internet

For many authors, the idea of a “brand” is one that they are vehemently against. They think a brand is something manufactured and fake. They want to be authentic. But the truth is, your author brand will emerge regardless. The key is to make that brand a positive one, which will eventually result in more sales.

What is an Author Brand

Generally, you can consider your author brand to be the amalgamation of the different content you present on the internet. You can have a different brand per social media, or have a singular one across all of them. For example, if all you post on Instagram are cat photos, your Instagram brand is just that: Cat photos.

Why does that matter? Because if you suddenly take your feline-focused timeline and turn it into one selling your horror novel, you might find yourself losing followers left and right. More importantly: You may not sell any books.

Taking it another way, your brand tells people what to expect from you. It helps build that all-important trust necessary for soft selling. Building your online persona focused on a certain theme helps attract potential readers of your genre.

Build a Brand Workshop

Multi-million dollar corporations have teams assigned to brand image and management. You, self- or indie- author, have just yourself. So you’re free to take it as detailed as you like.

Start by asking yourself, “What do I want people to think of when they see my name on social media?” Start at the ten thousand foot view:

Do I want to provide readers with information about a certain topic?
What are the main themes of my book(s)?
What genres do I write in, and what are other authors in that genre doing?

Once you have the answers to those questions, you can start digging deeper. Once you’ve got a general idea of the person you want to be on the internet, you can decide what kind of content you should be posting. For example: if you want to be known as an author who helps other indie authors, post indie knowledge anecdotes. If you want to be fantasy writer, you should follow nerd and geek sites like io9, so you have plenty of content to share to fellow nerds.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be more or less consistent. And, of course, if you find yourself veering away from what you thought your brand was, feel free to change it! After all, it’s your brand.

Social Media Etiquette

When it comes to your brand, how you behave is just as important as what you schedule. Every fan response, every reply builds your readers’ idea of you. So, obviously, you want to make sure that perception is a positive one.

It goes without saying: Never respond to negative reviews. Ever.

Even if you think you’re right, even if you think the reviewer is targeting you unfairly. Or if they got the book wrong. Even if you do it privately, because there’s no guarantee the reviewer won’t respond by screencapping your email and posting it for the world to see. Take a breath, write your response in an offline journal, and move on.

When it comes to ruining brand over bad sales, this is a bit more nuanced. Generally, people flock to two kinds of folks: those who are upbeat and positive, and those who cause lots of excitement by drumming up controversy. It’s why we love reality TV.

What people don’t love is when an author gets online and says, “Woe is me. Nobody buys my books. I guess I’ll just hang up my hat and stop writing.” You’ll get a few well-wishers, and maybe a pity sale, but what you’re doing is alienating the readers you do have. Instead, focus on giving yourself opportunities to highlight the positives. Run a sale on your books and post when it hits a high water mark.

This isn’t to say, “don’t be human.” If you’re having a bad day, share it with your followers if you feel it’s appropriate. One of our favorite tried-and-true methods for turning a frown upside-down is our “Bad Day Giveaway” where when we have a bad day, we’ll run a quick Twitter contest and give away a free eBook. We also like, “Tell us something great that happened to you.” It gets our fans talking, and brightens our own mood.

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Posted on June 5, 2017April 9, 2018 by Whitney Evans

Buffer for Authors – Queueing Content and Saving Time

We’ll admit, it took us a while to figure out how to incorporate Buffer into our marketing plan. But now, it’s part of our daily marketing tasks. Today, we’ll talk about the social media scheduler, and some ways that you can use it to complement your social media. Buffer for authors can be an incredible tool!

What is Buffer

Per their website:

What it does is simple. You add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you well spaced out over the day – and at the best times.

The free version offers you ten slots to fill up for a pre-set schedule that posts the same time every day. Depending on your social media needs, you could do all ten in one day, or space them out over a few days or a week.

All about that Queue

One of the big reasons why we couldn’t crack the Buffer nut is we don’t work so much in queues. We like auto-scheduling functions which post different content at different times. We piloted Buffer with CoSchedule, and we ended up with a series of Twitter posts about a single blog post without anything in-between. Or, when it was an off day, we’d end up with one post at 7am every day (because we didn’t have anything else in our queue).

What we started doing instead was to combine it with Feedly, which allows us to aggregate blogs from marketing, publishing, SEO, and any of the other topics that we blog about. Then, every morning, we browse through posts and pick our favorites, adding them to our Buffer queue. We can also use the Chrome add-in to re-share directly from the browser.

In essence, we use CoSchedule’s autoscheduler to post our content and Buffer to share information from others. It gives us that right balance between self-promotion and sharing good content from other people.

Maximize your Buffer

One of the great things about Buffer is the schedule. If you’re an indie author, your fanbase is probably international. You can use the Buffer scheduler to post content all 24 hours, allowing you to do things like write your books instead of being attached to Social Media.

We are also BIG fans of the Re-Buffer feature. When we have an article that resonates with us and our fans, we can re-add it to the queue. Buffer provides fantastic analytics on each of your posts to see which got the most likes, retweets and shares, and comments.

If you’re not a fan of Feedly, you can add a “Buffer button” to your internet browser or, when you download the app, you’ll get an option to share a link to your Buffer. This is really useful for re-tweeting followers, and helps space out your content without having to sit on a website.

Finally, and this is probably more helpful with the paid users (who get up to 100 Buffer posts in their queue), the shuffle feature is beneficial if you’ve added a few items from the same source and want to mix it up a bit.

Have you tried Buffer? What are your favorite tips?

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Posted on May 29, 2017April 9, 2018 by Whitney Evans — 2 Comments

CoSchedule – Your Social Media Life in Plain View

Being a small business, we’re pretty particular about what we invest money in. Our goal is usually to try to do something ourselves first, and when we realize we can’t, then hire it out. Sometimes, however, investing a little bit in something else pays dividends. Today, we’re going to talk about a paid app we’ve come to adore called CoSchedule.

It’s a social media scheduling platform that connects to pretty much every social platform and WordPress. You can write a blog and schedule all your Tweets, Instagrams, Facebooks, Tumblrs and whatnot in an easy-to-see calendar.

Disclaimer: I’m not a paid advocate for this product… yet.

Why Should You Schedule Content?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent some time talking about different social media. If you’re like most authors, you’re trying to juggle your writing career with a full-time job, and perhaps a family, too. Marketing probably doesn’t rank high on your list of things to do (although it should).

By scheduling your content ahead of time, it allows you the flexibility to have a life, as well as maintain a regular presence across different media. You shouldn’t schedule everything, of course. Regular human interaction is important, too.

Why CoSchedule?

We’ve tried a couple different tools, but CoSchedule is far and away the best for our needs (we’ll talk about Buffer next week). In the first place, since we’re managing two separate (but occasionally overlapping) social media brands, CoSchedule makes it easy to put together campaigns. Our weekly SGR-P blog posts are cross-posted across all ten of our connected social media accounts, alongside whatever S. Usher Evans is doing that week.

The calendar view, in particular, is extremely helpful:

We can take a look at each day and level-out if we’ve got too many messages on Monday, or not enough on Tuesday. We can also filter by social media account (to check the number of tweets or Instagram posts) or by campaign/tag. It’s been very helpful as we try to juggle multiple campaigns, from these blog posts to book releases to hosting other authors on the blog.

Content Templates – Our Best Friend

Our best-loved feature in CoSchedule is the ability to create “templates” of social messages. For example, these blog posts get the same treatment week after week. CoSchedule’s Social Campaign feature lets us set up “text helpers” (reusable phrases) and “image helpers,” then put them in a queue of Facebook posts, tweets–even Instagram posts and Pinterest pins. For those of us who blog on the regular, having all this already set up means an hours’ worth of social media scheduling is wrapped up in about 2 minutes.

So Many Ways…

Blogging comprises only one piece of our daily social media habits. Below are the different ways we use CoSchedule to help us get our message to the masses:

As we said above, we’ve got a reusable template for our weekly blog posts. One-click and done to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram
Speaking of Instagram, we LOVE using text helpers for all those pesky hashtags. We have a set that we use for all posts and then leave a blank placeholder for post-specific hashtags.
We also use CoSchedule to post and share our Wednesday quote picks and also pin them to Pinterest

Our favorite CoSchedule hack is to use templates and text helpers for Twitter Chats. We’ve got a template set up for promo tweets (which start 2 weeks before the chat). Then, on the day of, we have 10 template questions that we fill in with specifics and images. There’s no scheduling, no worrying about the hashtag–it’s all done for us! What used to take us several hours now takes 10 minutes, including the time to dream up questions.

As we said above, it takes a really great product for us to throw down some business dollars to invest in. But for our money and for what we’re trying to accomplish, CoSchedule is worth every penny!

CoSchedule from Garrett Moon on Vimeo.

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Posted on May 22, 2017April 11, 2017 by Whitney Evans

Pinterest for Authors – Finding Inspiration

Pinterest for authors: Taking creativity to the next level

Pinterest is yet another tool authors can use to raise awareness about their books. It differs from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in that it’s less about content that you create, and more about what you find and share. For authors, Pinterest is another way readers can get to know the real you, which helps with soft-selling.

Pinterest for Authors 101

Pinterest is a “visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.” Users save bookmarks, or Pins, to different boards, which usually have some different theme or idea behind them. You would “pin” something to come back to it later. In the case of authors, pin images that inspire you from other users or from external websites. Others can then save your pins to their board, and so on.

Building your Boards

Last week, we talked about an Instagram aesthetic, or a look and feel that conveys your overall theme. For Pinterest, we can take that idea and apply it to different boards. If you’re using Pinterest 100% professionally, you should consider having boards for each of you book series (both published and forthcoming, more on this later). You also might add boards for writing, quotes, scenes, etc. Find authors in your genre and see what kind of boards they have.

Pinterest is a great tool to help build word-of-mouth for unpublished and forthcoming books. Users can watch you put together your inspiration in real-time, and get an idea for the book before they read a single word. Once the book is published, you can add pins to buy the book.

Legal and Copyright

Before we go further, we should mention that Pinterest’s copyright issues are well-known, so tread carefully. If you’re pinning from an external site, and they have a “Pin It” button, it’s usually safe to assume they want their content shared. Before you pin, it’s also a good idea to check the link and make sure it’s a legitimate site. You also want to make sure proper credit is given to any piece of art you use for your inspiration board.

Growing your Pinterest Audience

We talk a lot about a social media half-life, or the length of time a post is visible and shareable. On average, the average lifespan of a tweet is under five minutes. Pinterest? Three months! (Source) Not only that, but 80% of pins on Pinterest are re-pins, which means people are using the content within the site versus finding their own.

For authors, you can leverage your existing social media audience to draw them in, or start following authors or readers who are pinning similar images (check the “Also pinned by” board). You can also comment on popular pins, but be careful not to spam with too many comments.

While Pinterest is a great tool, for authors, for most folks it’s less of a must-have and more another facet of your online persona. We use it more for personal/professional use, having a mix of food boards with inspiration quotes, and even publishing knowledge. In particular, the inspiration board is great when things are going a bit rough.

If you haven’t tried out Pinterest, we do recommend spending an hour or two on it.

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Posted on May 15, 2017April 4, 2017 by Whitney Evans

Instagram for Authors: A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

Instagram for authors: a photo is worth a thousand words

Instagram is fast becoming the most-used mobile social media site, hitting 600 million users in December 2016. It represents a different medium to reach our audience, using not text, but photographs. Still, with over 300 million daily active users, Instagram for authors is a marketing tool they cannot live without.

Instagram in a Nutshell

Instagram is a social media site where users posts photos. It’s intended to be a mobile-only solution, with limited functionality available on the desktop site. Instagram also connects with Facebook (who owns it), Twitter, Tumblr, and more for easy cross-posting of content. Content is displayed to users via an algorithm–the more times a user has interacted with your content, the more they will see your posts in their feeds.

Instagram functions differently than Facebook and Twitter in several different ways. On most social media sites, content remains forever. You can use search features to find content from way back to 2013 and even 2005 for Facebook. The most successful Instagram users, on the other hand, keep their feed to under 100 photos, deleting older and lower-performing photos and keeping the ones that fit their “aesthetic.” An aesthetic is a je ne sais quoi, or the overarching thematic elements of a photograph. Grouped together in a profile, these photos have common colors, angles, etc.

Some common aesthetics for authors include showcasing what you’re working on, such as your Scrivener word count or computer screen, photos of what you’re reading, or your book, or even just having the same filter for every photo to keep the colors the same.

Now, not every Instagram user implements an aesthetic, but having a common visual theme is important to finding new followers. Users want to see visually appealing content, although the occasional dog/cat (or, in one author’s case, ferret) photo is also welcome.

Instagram for Authors

For authors, Instagram provides another avenue to be creative, although for some, switching from word to photos is a bit of a stretch. All you need is your smartphone, a setting, and maybe some small items to stage the photo with. You can even take a few photos at once and schedule them using your favorite content scheduler (more on those in a few weeks).

Once you’ve got your photo, use your phone to upload it to the site and add a filter. Then you’ll need to add some text describing the photo. You can either go short and sweet or long and descriptive. Both options work!

If you decide to go long, Instagram removes carriage returns (line breaks) without text. As well, some users like to “hide” their hashtags at the bottom of their posts so they don’t clutter up the important text (or they add it as a comment).

For both, you’ll often see users add:

[Text text text]
.
.
[more text or hashtags]

Hashtags

Unlike Twitter, which recommends one or two hashtags per tweet, or Facebook, where hashtags never took off, Instagram is an app that thrives on hashtags. You may use up to 30 hashtags, and if you’re looking to boost engagement and reach, you should use every single one.

Some of the best are below:

Bookstagram
Bookish
Bookaholic
Bookaddict
Booklover
Booknerd
Booknerdigans
IreadYa
YALit
YAbooks
amreading
igreads
igwrites
amwriting
writerscommunity
indieauthor

To find more, check out our two Instagram accounts (susherevans and sgrpublishing).

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories is a new(ish) feature introduced by Instagram that favors Snapchat’s formula of instant photos with text and drawings that disappear after they’ve been seen. For Instagrammers, especially those who want to keep their profiles to under a hundred photos, Instagram Stories provides an opportunity to showcase more than your aesthetic. You can post behind-the-scenes, short videos, and even advertise your new posts to show them to users who might have missed them. Unlike photos on your main feed, all stories are shown to all users.

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Posted on May 8, 2017March 30, 2017 by Whitney Evans — 3 Comments

Facebook Groups – A Multi-Purpose Tool

Facebook Groups for Authors are exactly what they sound like–place where people can gather to have discussions about different things. For authors, they present three opportunities for marketing. Authors can join groups with other authors in their genre for networking, or they can join groups where readers are hunting for the best deals. Or authors can create their own groups for managing street teams. We’ll cover all three in this blog post.

Author Support Groups

If you’ve decided to self-publish, the road can seem pretty lonely at times. That’s why it’s important to find other authors in your genre to network and lean on for help and support. Using Facebook’s search function, you can seek out genre groups and ask to join them. Most of these groups will be closed to protect individual authors.

Besides emotional support, these groups offer opportunities to work with other authors in your genre, too. Here is where you mind find an opportunity to add yourself to a box set, or join in a promotion activity. But as for self-promo, these groups usually have pretty strict rules around it (usually not allowed).

Genre Groups

So where do you go to promote your book? Alongside author support groups, there are hundreds of Facebook groups dedicated to helping readers find the best deals on their favorite kinds of books. These are the groups, usually, where you can post (or request to post) your sale book info. Be careful though, as these can become what we call “author graveyards” where the only people reading the content are authors who stop in to post their own stuff.

Street Team Groups

In the first two examples, you are a participant and the groups are already being created. In this case, you are the owner and operator, which opens up a whole lot of fun opportunities.

We’ll have a blog about street teams at a later date, but suffice to say, we’re big believers in them. In the first place, a street team helps you soft sell your book to others and may also help boost your review numbers. In return for helping you spread the word, you can give them free stuff like swag and eBooks. (Want to join our alter-ego’s Street Team? Click here!)

While there are many options to managing your street team, there really is no better option than Facebook Groups (although Goodreads Groups may come in a close second). From a content display standpoint, topics are organized by original post. You can also pin posts to the top of the discussion that you want the team to see.

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Posted on May 1, 2017April 3, 2017 by Whitney Evans

Facebook Pages for Authors – Your Professional Profile

Facebook pages for authors: the best way to reach fans on the social network

Facebook Pages for Authors are some of the best tools writers can use to find their readers. Facebook is, of course, one of the most popular social medias available today. Many of your readers will seek you out (or you’ll find them) via the website. But there’s a few things to know when working with the website.

Facebook Profile vs. Pages

Most of us probably already have a Facebook profile. It’s where we post photos of our pets and kids and food, and where we get into arguments with our family on the opposite side of the political spectrum. But Facebook intends for your personal profile to be just that–personal. If you use your profile to sell, there’s a chance it could get flagged for removal.

Instead, authors should create Facebook Pages. You’ll need to use your personal page to create a page, and Facebook has more information here.

Facebook vs. Twitter

Each social media site has a different type of content that works better. Whereas Twitter works best with a lot of content, Facebook requires decidedly less posting frequency to achieve the same result. As well, Twitter shows all content in a stream, Facebook has the dreaded algorithm (yes, much like Amazon’s) that shows content to specific people.

For both media, videos and images work better than straight text. You can also use a litany of different tools to connect Twitter and Facebook so you’ll only have to post in one place.

Facebook’s Algorithm

One of our biggest issues with Facebook is the algorithm. Facebook is moving toward a model of pay-to-play; that is, they’d like pages to pay to reach the audience they’ve already accumulated. They rank certain content higher, including content that doesn’t come from your own website. We’ve noticed a difference between blogs that originate on our own URLs and guest blogs from other URLs.

Because of this, we use both our Facebook pages as just another tool to disseminate information, instead of an active presence where we talk to our fans.

The other reason why we opt to not utilize Facebook (or pay them) is because our audience is much younger than Facebook. For authors who target young adults and teens, they’re better served focusing their energy on Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. For those who focus more on older adults, Facebook is the place to focus your energy.

Facebook Ads

For those who are focusing on the older audiences of Facebook, it might be worth it to invest in Facebook’s advertising programs. For a budget that you set, you can boost your posts or show your posts to brand new people. Facebook also allows you to have pretty refined granularity to show your ads to specific people. Considering the amount of information people feed to Facebook through likes and comments, there’s a good chance, if your users are on Facebook, your ad might be seen by them.

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Posted on April 24, 2017April 23, 2017 by Whitney Evans

Twitter Chats – A Party In Your Feed

Twitter chats help you connect with readers while having fun

Last week, we blogged about Twitter for Authors. Before we get away from it, we wanted to talk a little more about an underutilized idea in the Twitter community called a twitter chat. For authors, Twitter chats can be an excellent way to connect with your audience, and grow it.

Twitter Chat vs. Hashtags vs. LiveTweets

Hashtags (#hashtag) are used to do many things on Twitter. They can be used as a emotional vibe (#grateful) or to denote meaning (#sarcasm) or even just to be silly (#thispostisthebestyo). When a bunch of people use the same hashtag, Twitter groups their conversations onto a single page. If you’ve never clicked on a hashtag before, try it and you’ll see.

A Twitter chat happens when a bunch of users assemble on Twitter at the same time and answer questions (or just converse) using a single, unique hashtag. For example, the #QwSush hashtag is used by S. Usher Evans to host her quarterly book conversations. And #BBTC is used by blogger Brittany’s Book Rambles to host her weekly chats.

Now, you might have heard about Livetweeting, so what’s that? The same basic idea–a group of people talking about the same hashtag–but in this case, it’s related to something happening in a movie or on TV. Jamie (and her team) from Black Girl Nerds regularly livetweet television shows, movies, and award shows using unique hashtags. In some cases, livetweeting and social media has been picked up by showrunners to gauge how well something is being received.

Joining a Twitter Chat

For authors, a good chat to join every Wednesday is the Book Marketing Chat hosted by Melissa and Rachel. How do you join? Log into Twitter around 9pm EST and click on the hashtag. Add to the conversation by replying to questions or making comments about the topic at hand, but make sure to add #bookmarketingchat to every tweet so it gets seen by the larger group.

In most cases, there will be Q1, Q2, Q3 which denote the questions the moderators are asking. So you’ll respond

A1: Here is my comment #bookmarketingchat

And so on.

You can find a full list of Twitter Chats courtesy of Emily from Emily Reads Everything.

Starting a Twitter Chat

This one may take a little while to master. Of course, you can start a Twitter chat by adding a hashtag to your tweets, but there’s no guarantee someone will respond and join. As with most things, you should schedule your chat in the future, and use your soft-selling skills to inform your friends and followers that it’s happening.

For our Twitter chats, we prefer to pre-schedule everything. From promo tweets to the questions themselves, everything is set to go in our CoSchedule application up to a month before chat time. We also like to add graphics to each of the questions with the day and time of the chat, but it’s not necessary. The biggest reason why we like to preschedule is it ensures we ask all the questions we want to, and more importantly, we’ve added the right hashtag!

If you’re doing a chat to just chat, the questions can be as crazy as you are. If you’re doing a book-related chat, try to mix up the questions. Some about the book, some about topics tangentially related to the book, some about the people themselves. It’s always good to toss in a question that asks them to tag a friend, so you might get more chatters in the mix.

The important thing is to have fun!

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