Twitter: Spam vs. Marketing

A few months ago I took down all of my programmed tweets that directly marketed my ebooks. I did this out of frustration with how many of these tweets I was seeing in my own stream. They vastly outnumber tweets where anyone actually says anything about how their day is going or whatever. When I attempted to make  list of tweeps who "tweet real stuff" I only managed to accumulate 24 people, out of a potential group of nearly 2000. This makes Twitter really boring to me. I felt like I was just looking at a stream of spam, and it didn't help that 4 out of 5 of these marketing tweets used quotes from the novels with grammar errors or style issues in the quotes. One vampire novelist's quote said something along the lines of, "A dead body! Someone sucked his ass dry!" Now, just give that one a minute to knock around in your head. Not a pretty picture, is it? A couple of times I couldn't help myself--I had to @ the person with the troublesome tweet and point out the problem. This was never received very well (I can't imagine why!). Seriously, though. You're tweeting something from your book. Why not choose a line that actually flows well?

Yeah, that's what I end up thinking, too. They've probably already chosen the best line in their book.

But I digress.

Back to my point: I got fed up with all the marketing tweets especially since most of them seem to come from people who otherwise are not engaged with Twitter at all, or very little. I nixed my own, and kept an eye on my sales. At first, nothing changed. Then I had a couple of pretty dry months. Then, April happened. In which I more than tripled the the best month of sales I ever had before on Amazon, and had my second best month ever on B&N. What changed?

Well, in April I was giving away two books. I released The Plane and the Parade so I was giving away The River and the Roses. And I had just started giving away Myadar's Snare then, too (I still am; get it here.) And because I wanted to be sure everyone knew about these giveaways, I did a lot more tweeting about them than I had been. I also sent out some direct messages--I really hope those didn't annoy anyone, but since what I was DMing about was free, I decided it was a risk worth taking. Since the free books are located here on the blog, I can't be sure that the tweets led directly to the sales--after all, for that to be the case, a lot of people would have had to click through on the pictures in the margins here or on the links on the ebook description page or something. I also joined several Goodreads groups in April and added my books to a few bookshelves, so it's quite possible that made a big difference--although I only did that with the Myadar books, and I sold a bunch of Veronica books as well as Broken Ones, too, which I didn't post.

So I've decided to give marketing tweets another try and see what happens. Right now, I'm only going to send out 2 or 3 a day. This is extremely low. Michael Hicks, who is my hero because he started out like any indie publisher and worked his way to where he quit his day job and bought a house in Florida with a pool, for pity's sake, sends them out every 60 to 120 minutes, for instance. He's being moderate compared to some of the spammers I mentioned above. I just really don't want someone who only has three dozen followers to open their Twitter account one morning and have to scroll through my fifty marketing tweets clogging their stream.

So we'll see if these tweets do anything. I may eventually up it to 6 a day, although I'm going to give it some time first. I'll give an update when I've seen what happens. By the way, if you don't already follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

How do you schedule your tweets? Have you found that one kind of tweet is more effective for your sales than others (a book description, a quote from the book, a quote from a reviewer)?

When you see promo tweets, is there one kind you prefer? How do you feel about seeing a lot of promo tweets in your stream?

An Award for Moi

I'm so spoiled. I have some really really really supportive online writer buddies who give me way more credit than I deserve. One of them, Mary Frame, has given me an award!

This award comes with a few conditions:

1. Thank and link to the person who nominated me. Thank you Mare!!!
2. Share seven random facts about myself.
3. Pass the award along to 5 new-found blogging buddies.
4. Contact those buddies to congratulate them.

So this is one of those nice ways to create connections on the internet, and Mare's blog, It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets an Agent, is full of great writing advice, so start by checking that out. Then check out the five I've chosen to pass the award on to below.

But first, my seven random facts:

1. I was in commercials when I was a kid. My dad had a successful career in advertising (he was one of the Martins in the Martin Agency, which meant something back in the 80s) and he got me in a couple of tv ads and several print ones. I don't remember a whole lot about it, except in one there were several rows of people standing for the photo, and they had to find a box for this one guy to stand on because he was too short. In another, there was fake snow--I was supposed to pretend to look for Santa as I stood out on a porch. And in another I had to pretend this woman was my mother, and she looked nothing like her. And I remember after another one getting recognized in a grocery store. But eventually I wasn't cute enough anymore--I mean literally, that's what the photographer who used me as a model said. Ah, the crushed dreams of ten year olds. Actually, I don't remember being all that crushed.

2. I spend 6 years living in Paris, 5 of which were my 8th grade through high school years. Veronica in Paris draws heavily on that experience. I never really bonded with French kids, though, although there were boys I had crushes on. My friends were all expats from all over the world. As a result I never see them anymore--I wish I did! I'd be jetting off to New Zealand or London or Beijing...

3. I like to forage wild food. Today we went mushroom hunting, but didn't find any. Which is typical of my experiences with mushroom hunting. I'm much more successful at berry hunting but that's a few months away still.

4. I was an AmeriCorps member for two years in San Diego. It was the hardest job I've ever done, but probably also one of the most rewarding, mainly in the second year when I was a team leader. The admin let us team leaders have a lot of say in how the program was run, which was really satisfying. Now when I see people in admin making inefficient or even counterproductive decisions all I can do is take deep breaths and think, "I'll find a way to work around this." Back then, I could say, "That's not going to work, here's why, and here's what we should do instead," and 90% of the time, they'd listen. I miss that. But the job was still incredibly difficult. We were supposed to do these huge community service projects and we literally had no budget. It was a rule in the grant that funded us--we were not allowed to have a budget. We had to find in-kind donations for everything. It was really really tough. I would periodically interview for jobs elsewhere. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. Completing those two years (the max you could stay with one program) taught me all sorts of skills and also made me realize I could stick with something even when it's hard.

5. I was a bit of a goth kid in high school (yes, in Paris--what a place to be a goth!). I used to think I'd name my first born son Lestat.

6. The first ever play I auditioned for was in 7th grade (still in the US)--I got the part of Miss Lucy in Dracula.

7. I will eat (and enjoy) a lot of things the average American would be totally freaked out by--deep fried pigs' feet, snails, raw sea urchin, tripe sausage, chicken livers and liver pate, etc., but I cannot stand pieces of corn in cornbread. Ugh! Ptooey ptooey.

Okay, so now for the list of award winners:

I'd pick Mary Kaley but Mary Frame already got to her.

So, the first award goes to:

Michael R. Hicks, who writes science fiction, and is enjoying a fair amount of success at epublishing. I've been following his blog with enthusiasm, as he is sharing the secrets of that success. Last I heard, he's seriously considering quitting his day job. That's such an inspiration to me!

Award #2 goes to:

Kelvin O'Ralph, who has been doing wonderful, wonderful things for a small group of writers (me among them) on Goodreads. He set up a group and is having everyone follow each other and tag each other's books. Great stuff.

Award #3 goes to:

Alexander Hammond, who writes humor. Anyone who can make me laugh or even smile after some of the days I have at the continuation school deserves an award.

Award #4 and #5 go to:

Lori Sizemore and Cynthia Robertson, because both of them have been so supportive and they only just met me, and on Twitter, to boot.