My friend Greg Crouch is writing a book which I think has bestseller potential. He’s an engaging writer and he has a great story about the pilots that flew the Himalaya in World War II. But like me, he’s a climber and a writer and, not surprisingly, a latecomer to Twitter. The era of writers being able to trust to publishers to do their promotion is mostly over for anyone but A-List bestsellers like John Grisham and Stephen King, so an author has to take matters into his or her own hands.

I’ve already written about how I use Twitter and why I follow so few people. I’ve also thought about the possible ways to use Twitter. Greg’s situation got me thinking specifics of how to use Twitter as a writer. My books, being obscure scholarly tomes, I haven’t used Twitter to promote them, but I’ve been watching how people use Twitter and what works and what doesn’t and this is my best advice to Greg. If you have something to add, disagree with something, or think this is good advice and want to encourage Greg to follow this advice, please help Greg out by leaving a comment.

If you don’t need a pep talk about self-promotion, you can skip straight to the bit on how writers can use Twitter, but first I feel compelled to address something that might be the biggest obstacle for many writers…

Self-Promotion Makes You Feel Icky? Get Over It!

Best-selling author Tim Ferris gives a great interview on Mixergy.com that provides illuminating insight the new world of book publishing and promotion. Every author should listen to this. If you’re too much of an artiste to get out there and hawk your book, be prepared to see your book remaindered. Comfort with self-promotion is a major hurdle for many authors, especially those of us trained to life of scholarship and poverty. So before we even get into the specifics of Twitter, first ask yourself:

• Do you think your book is worthwhile and well-written?
• Do you think that there are people out there who would derive pleasure or useful information from your book?
• Do you think there’s something slimy about making it as easy as possible for people to learn about and purchase a useful and/or enjoyable book?
• You’re diligent enough to write a book, are you too lazy to do some work to spread the word about it?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, may you write the book of the century, so brilliant that word will spread all on its own with no help from you. Otherwise, may the Force be with you. I would say "no skin off my back," but if you have a book that I would enjoy reading, it is skin off my back. That’s the realization that changed my attitudes on the subject (though not always my practice). If you have something that could improve someone’s life, even "just" by being entertaining, and you do nothing to get the word out there, you are doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit and you are dishonoring your own labor.

That’s probably preaching to the choir. Most people probably agree with that already or need a lot more convincing than that. But in any case, ask yourself very honestly if self-promotion still makes you feel icky. I’ll be honest, it does me, but thinking about it like I just outlined, makes me a lot more comfortable with it.

Ideas on How to Use Twitter as an Author

Okay, so you’re convinced that you owe it to your soon-to-be adoring public to get the word out about your masterpiece. You’ll want to create a Facebook Fan Page. And you’ll want to build a presence and above all a following on Twitter.

Your goal is to connect with people who share your interests and might enjoy your book in order to create an audience who will be ready to buy when the book comes out. It’s not how many copies you sell in a year that affects your Amazon (or god willing NYT) ranking, it’s how many you’ve sold recently. So one of the keys is preparing the soil. You have all these people following you because you post on stuff they care about. They like you for it and they’re grateful, which is as it should be, because it takes actual effort on your part. Your book comes out. Your Twitter followers buy 500 copies. It’s not many, but it’s all in the same week. That makes you the #1 history book on Amazon and pushes you to the top to get noticed. Small numbers are big here.

• Remember: You’re reaching out to new people, not keeping up with your old surfing buddies. That has a big impact on what you’ll post and it’s good to be clear on your goals. I have two accounts. On my "just for friends" account, for the most part, if we’ve never had a face-to-face conversation, I’m not following you on that account and I’m posting stuff that only people who know me would find interesting (and often not even them). I’ve been playing with Twitter to help attract readers to one of my websites. For that, I tweet on personal topics, but not inside jokes for my friends, and I keep most of the posts on subjects in line with the website.
• Create a custom profile background. Your background should say something about who you are. Once you have a cover design, you need a photo of the book on your profile page.
• Link to your book’s website from your profile. You have at least a basic website for your book right? No? Why not? You can build a simple website in an hour.
• This is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re a writer, so you know all about persistence and marathons. If you have a year until your book goes to press, that’s great. You’ll need all of that because it’s important to start building that audience now.
• Content first, then networking. You can start following your real-world friends right away, but don’t follow people you don’t know until you have some posting history. I always look to see what sort of posts someone has before I follow back. If it’s just 2-3 vague posts, I don’t follow back.
• Write tweets on topics related to your book. When I say "related to your book" that doesn’t mean only self-absorbed posts about how the writing is going, but also just topically related. If you’re writing about pilots flying over the Himalaya in World War II, then you could have posts on WWII history, aviation, the Himalaya. Link to books or book reviews on something you’ve read lately that you liked. Share something cool you’ve found in your research. And yes, the occasional self-absorbed post about how the writing is going. Tweet enough about topics loosely related to your book that there is always one on your profile page.
• Don’t sell on Twitter. Your goal is to connect, have a presence and on rare occasions mention that you have a book for sale. Rare occasions. In other words, as often as you would want to get a sales pitch from every person in your stream, that’s how often they want a sales pitch from you. Save it for when you need.
• Sell on Twitter. Okay, sometimes you do need it. When your book comes out and you want to generate momentum to get higher listings in Amazon or, God willing, the New York Times. That’s when you call on the people who follow you and say, very simply, "If you’re thinking of buying my book eventually, it would be huge for me if you ordered it this week." That’s 101 characters, so there’s even enough left over for a link to where to buy it. Remember though, this it a rare event, calling in a favor from your followers in return for all the great links and thoughts you offer without asking anything in return.
• Regular updates are good, but more than a couple a day and people get tired of you. There are only two sorts of people who will put up with a regular output of 20 posts per day — people who are filtering and not actually reading you anyway, and people who are stalking you and you shouldn’t be giving them that much information. Everyone else is just getting annoyed and they will unfollow you. One marketer type I was reading said there is an optimum number of tweets per day, and that number is three. I think he meant it half tongue-in-cheek, but that correlates with my experience in terms of who I most like to follow. Also, it’s not about averages. The worst twitterers of all do no posts for a month, then do thirty in two days. Never forget that it takes only one click to unfollow you.
• No minute-by-minute updates. If coffee doesn’t play a big role in your book, nobody cares what kind of coffee you had this morning. I hate to break the bad news, but aside from your mother and a few friends, nobody cares about you. They will follow you because you have something interesting to say for them.
• Be personal, be real. The flip side of the last point is that you want to be a real person, the idea is to connect with people on a somewhat more personal level, so your Twitter stream needs some personal flavor, some updates that are not "on topic". It’s a balance, between letting people know who you are and burying them in an avalanche of personal detail. Write a fair number of posts that are specific to you (either personally or your book). If your best friend or spouse can’t guess from the content on the first page whose Twitter stream it is, you’re being way too vague and general.
• Follow the people who follow you if they don’t look like robots or spammers. If someone looks really off from my interests, I don’t follow, but generally you want to because this allows you to direct message each other which can really help get to know someone. If you’re writing non-fiction and still researching, you probably want to make it easy for people to communicate with you.
• Actively block spammers and robots. Some people disagree with this. What’s the harm in having someone you don’t like follow you and add to your follower count? The way I see it, when you follow someone, before they follow back, they’ll look at what you post, who’s following you and who you follow. You want that profile to look like "their people" (i.e. actual human beings who read books like yours). Put another way, think about how Google evaluates web pages. It’s who links to you and who you link to that helps them decide which "neighborhood" you’re in. I want my Twitter profile to show that I’m in a neighborhood of "our people". In the Twitter world, I live in a gated community. Spammer scumbags are turned away by security.
• Find people to follow with Twitter search. With some Twitter readers (Hoot Suite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc.), you can create a column for a search if you really want to follow your topic. Put in some words related to your book and find people to follow and connect with. If you follow someone, he or she will likely look at your profile. If they see a kindred spirit, they’ll follow you.
• If someone mentions you, they’ll do so with an "at reply" and you must acknowledge it. To fail to do so makes you look like a prima dona too busy to respond to the little people. If you are like Neil Gaiman with thousands of followers, all reasonable people will understand that you can’t respond to everyone (though Neil gets complaints from people who just don’t get it). For most of us, though, it is completely manageable in a few minutes per day. If you don’t have those few minutes, then just don’t be on Twitter. Simple as that. Of be on Twitter, but just for social reasons, not to spread the word about your book.

I know there are many things I’ve left out and maybe some things that you disagree with. If so, please leave a comment to make this post better for other writers!

New Twitter Retweet Function — Does the Length of Your Username Still Matter?

In times of yore, like last month, having a long username was a liability for getting "retweeted" because your Twitter nickname counted toward the character count in the retweet (which sounds like something Elmer Fudd would say to the troops do if being overrun by superior forces: Retweet! Retweet!). Twitter has recently added new functionality that makes the length of the username irrelevant, but I’m somewhat sorry they did. I think that this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Under the new system, if I retweet something, it appears to my followers as if they’re suddently following that person. In my profile picture appearing in their stream, but the person I retweeted appearing out of nowhere in their stream. This is in theory good for the the person who wrote the original post, but not necessarily.

• From the end reader perspective. I find this confusing. Suddenly people I don’t know are appearing in my stream. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I don’t particularly like that. On the plus side, I have instant one-click access to the original author’s information.
• From the retweeter’s perspective. I lose my identity. I may want to share something, but I may want my followers to know that it’s from me. On the plus side, I don’t have to edit a post down to fit into the 140-char limit.
• From the original author’s perspective. You might think there’s no downside here. Suddenly, there you are with your picture and everything in the stream of everyone who follows your beloved retweeter. The downside here is that you’ve mostly lost the benefits of social proof and the value of a retweet as a personal recommendation.

The last point bears some further comment. Let’s say I’m an author hoping to reach potential readers of my forthcoming book via Twitter (see Twitter for writers). I’m now injected picture and all into the user’s stream, which has to be better, right?

The problem is that the challenge is not in being available to the largest number of people, but in actually finding a way to cut through the noise. I delete at least half of my non-spam emails unopened and read at best 20% of what appears in my Twitter stream. And I follow very few people. I think the numbers are worse with someone who follows 200 or 2000 people. I tend to skim for the people I really want to read. More and more, Twitter applications let me filter into user lists, topic lists, and all sorts of things. So though I will always read something if it has @simplytheresa’s smiling face, on most days, I skip most people in my stream unless I’m in a serious procrastination mode. And to be clear, I’m not skipping people I actively dislike, because obviously I’m not following those people. I’m skipping anyone that I don’t really really really want to read, some days anyone who isn’t my wife. In other words, when
I’m skimming, it’s a whitelist algorithm, not a blacklist. I’m looking for people I actively want to read. If I’m not looking for you, you don’t get read. So if you someone retweets you with the native Twitter function, that means you. I don’t know you and I won’t read you.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the native Twitter. Most people use some third-party application to tweet from and that functionality is not included in most of them yet, though I suspect it will be soon. And then the next question is whether or not it will be widely adopted. I suspect it will.

So that leads to the important question: how can you get people to retweet old-style? In short, there’s not much you can do to positively encourage it. The best you can do is remove obstacles. Above all, that means making sure that your message stands on it’s own and doesn’t need editing to be retweeted.

Again, consider an author who wants to get the word out about his book, in part using Twitter. So if you’re giving a book reading, for example, that you announce on Twitter, you want your fans to be able to pass that on to their friends, which they will usually do with a "retweet". The old and still standard format is to take your message and copy it into their message and add "RT @yourname[space]".

Thankfully for Robert Louis Stevenson, he wasn’t trying to sell books in the Twitter era. By the time he leaves enough space for retweeting, he’s used up 25 characters, 18% of his total allotement. So he can’t tweet this 140 character message

I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8:30pm @ Moe’s in Berkeley

Because it would become

RT @RobertLouisStevenson I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8

Homer, on the other hand, would have it made.

RT @Homer I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Iliad this month – Dec 12, 7pm @ Book Passages, Corte Madera; Dec 14, 8pm at Moe’s in Berkeley

If at all possible, Robert Louis Stevenson would have wanted to get on Twitter day one to reserve RLS or at least RLStevenson. Regardless of the name, when composing a tweet that he wants retweeted, RLS would want to know his retweetable character count. The easy way to do this is to simply compose the post as a retweet, and then lop of the RT @RobertLouisStevenson part. Beyond that, people will do what they do and it remains to be seen whether the new interface features will overcome established practice. As I say, I suspect they will, and you’ll just have to live with it.

What do you think of the new Twitter Retweet function? Add a comment with your thumbs up or thumbs down.

Lately I keep coming across Goal Merchants, people from the Tony Robbins set who imbue goal-setting with various magical powers. They make what I think are outlandish claims for the power of goal setting. Many still love to cite the study of Princeton grads. According to the tale, some years ago, a class of Princeton grads was surveyed and one of the questions asked was whether they had written down precise, defined goals. When the researchers checked back many years later, those who had defined goals had achieved much greater success (whatever that means) than those who didn’t. Of course, we now know that no such study ever existed.

Fool’s Goal and the Value of Forests

Obviously, I’m not against long-term goal setting per se. As I mentioned, my weekly task list depends on having some longer term goals in order to decide what goes on the list. That said, if you set a long-term goal whose only value is in realizing the goal, it’s the wrong goal. As a historian, I’m in favor of long-term thinking. The problem is that when you chart a course into the future, you exclude the one-in-a-million probabilities, but over long enough spans of time, some of these come to pass, so there is too much uncertainty in long-term plans for them to have any degree of accountability.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them, but the value in long-term planning is usually in the unintended consequences that result from the fact that projecting far into the future allows us to understand more clearly what’s happening in the present. I strongly recommend the best book I know on long-term thinking, The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. Brand cites the example of the Swedish Navy who, in the eighteenth century, noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find tall straight trees to make masts for ships. Since having fast, powerful ships was an essential strategic resource, the navy commissioned the royal forester to set aside areas to grow these trees. Two hundred years later, the forester notified the navy that their trees were ready. The trees no longer had any great strategic value, but they did have tremendous value as some of the last remaining old-growth forest in Sweden. The goal of securing an essential strategic resource had been rendered null by new technology, but long-term planning had enabled the navy to recognize the problem of the disappearing forests.

It’s the same with the majority of goals we set. If we decide to train for a marathon, it’s not really finishing the marathon that matters for most of us. Most of the benefit is in the training for it.

At a certain point this year I found myself frustrated and feeling like I wasn’t getting anywhere on several different projects, while at the same time feeling like I was working too much and not having enough fun. I needed motivation, and I needed priorities. I came up with something that helps me with both and has been really successful for me. In brief, I started using a system where every Sunday I write down a small list of things I want to achieve in a given week and then hold myself to it absolutely.

Having some long-term goals helps prioritize tasks, but I mostly focus on short-term tasks, for reasons I explain below. These, by the way can be anything, even something like “get to bed before 10pm five nights this week” or “go skiing”. They always include some fun things, usually including at least four exercise days. This article is one item on this week’s list and so was this morning’s run. The key is that they are things I not only want to do (write, run) or have to do (paint the house), but things I will do that week, not things I sort of vaguely might to do that week if I get to it.

Failing Has to Feel Like This

If I fail, I “fine” myself $250. If I finish it, I award myself $50. The 5:1 ratio there is not accidental. Humans tend to be more attuned to voiding pain than to seeking pleasure. Losing five weeks of reward for a single failure is really powerful. The reward money into a pot to spend on things I otherwise wouldn’t sping for. Wireless headphones for example, which I most definitely don’t need, but not pants. Having a defined list, a defined deadline and $300 riding on it helps stay on track. It’s been an interesting experiment (going on about three months now). Depending on how miserly you are, maybe $300 won’t do it for you. Maybe you need to make it $3000. One thing is certain: for the system to work, it needs to be an amount of money that will hurt. It helps to have it allocated toward something you really want, so you tell yourself you’ll get that iPod Touch once you’ve saved up. So if you go five weeks and you’re almost there, missing one goal that week sets your iPod purchase back six weeks! Then you have a dilemma — stay up until midnight writing that article or wait an extra six weeks to buy your bauble. It’s powerful.

So what have I noticed as a result of my experiment?

Short-term tasks allow for accountability.

It’s hard to be accountable on a daily or weekly basis for progress toward long-term goals. Something that will take a year to achieve or perhaps that I may never really achieve is just too abstract. That abstraction makes those type of goals very easy to avoid, shirk and procrastinate on. Because I choose actions I can control and that are achievable, I can hold myself accountable every week. Focusing on a weekly list of discreet tasks that I must finish has four consequences:

1. My weekly tasks are not all that ambitious. I set targets I can meet. This helps me be realistic and really prioritize.
2. My weekly tasks are things I can control. So I would never say “Talk to Bill about X.” I would say “Make at least three attempts to reach Bill to discuss X”.
3. I have more true free time because when my list is done for the week, I’m done and can pitter and putter guilt free.
4. I rack up victories, not defeats, successes, not failures.

The last of these may be the most important. At any given moment, I have 200 years worth of things I would like to do in theory, but the list grows faster than I can knock things off. Life is just too damn interesting! The downside of there being so many interesting things to do in life is that they pile up and that can lead to feeling that I just get further and further behind on those long-term goals and that’s depressing.

Small steps are easier to take than giant steps.

As a mountaineer I have never found summits very motivating. I need to focus on the experience and on very small, intermediate milestones if I’m to get anywhere. On a long, steep snow slope, I often play the 50-step game, that is telling myself I will take 50 steps before I rest. Then I play the ten breaths game, that is, I’ll only rest for ten breaths, then start plodding again. The summit is too abstract. I focus on the immediate task and the experience and find that much better at keeping me going.

I once read something in Hindu literature which, sadly, I can’t find again, that said roughly: “If we dare too much, we will be destroyed, but by advancing in small steps, the gods themselves can be defeated.”

Any process you don’t break down into manageable components becomes overwhelming. Breaking it down into small unintimidating chunks makes everything more pleasant and manageable. Having these very discreet and achievable lists is like that. It’s a lot less intimidating to get going on something I can finish this week.

It’s ultimately not the goal that matters

Mark Twight, one of America’s great alpinists, notes that it’s possible to “fail upwards”, that is climb yourself into a situation unintentionally where your only recourse is to continue up, possibly in bad style and often at increasing risk. He sees that as a failure because you reach the summit not because you choose to, but because you have to. Conversely, it’s also possible to have a great climb that ends in retreat, but retreat on your own terms, which can be a success (you have a great time, you learn a lot, you live). Ultimately, the value lies in the climb, not in the summit.

That might not make obvious sense to people who don’t climb. Maybe instead of a climb, your goal is to make ten million dollars. What if you “failed upwards”, that is made your ten million dollars with a successful business, but in doing so you compromised everything you believed in and destroyed your health from overwork? On the other hand, what if you retreated short of the summit, but built a business that changed the lives of your employees and customers for the better, was exciting and satisfying, but in the end, after 15 years, still didn’t turn a profit and closed it’s doors? In the latter case you failed to achieve your goal, but which was the failure and which was the success?

With these small, achievable steps, based on your long-term and short-term goals, it also keeps you focused on the journey, but a journey with the summit in view.

The Practical Part

Incidentally, I usually just create a table each week in a Google Doc, adding the new week at the top of the document, and put my task/goal in the left column and fill out the right column as I accomplish things. I track the money part in an Excel spreadsheet. I also keep my “anything goes” TODO list using the awesome TODO list from Abstract Spoon. It has pretty much everything I need, but I keep hundred or thousands of items in there, categorized by things like “reading lists”, “house”, “Ultraskier” and so on.

Your Turn

What do you do to get motivated when you feel frustrated? What do you do to keep cool when you feel overwhelmed? Do you have a good system? Tell me what it is in the comments or use the comment field to drop a link to it if you have an article about it somewhere.

You had a great idea and ran out and bought a domain. You had seven articles in your head and you were going to run home on Friday night, build your killer site and write articles all weekend. But then you had to cut the grass and the car broke down and that was 2006.

Or, you had an idea for this brilliant new service and you would have run home and started coding, but first you need to learn seven new technologies and, well, there are dogs to feed and you still haven’t learned how to integrate Ruby on Rails with SMS messaging, so you’ve been working away for three years, hundreds of hours, but you haven’t launched anything, so you don’t actually have a clue whether or not anyone actually wants your service. Have you been wasting your time and how will you know?

The best way to find out, is to get a simple content site up and start collecting data to find out whether there’s any interest at all. Launch simple and then, depending on what rolls in for data, build it out. At least, you’ll have some content that can site on the web and age.

Still stuck? I just gave a talk at Pubcon on the simplest, fastest method to get something online, because something, is better than nothing.

The idea was to inspire people to simplify the process and make it as easy as possible to get started, get some content up and start collecting data to find out if anyone but you actually gives a damn about your genius idea before you spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars thinking about it.

You can download the Powerpoint Deck here:
Super Rapid Website Developement

I hope you enjoy it – if you have any questions, drop me a line.