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.

So I started out by asking myself why I follow some people and not others and why in the world do I have any followers at all? I’m new to Twitter and obviously not some expert that anyone should heed, but I do like to think about why I do what I do. So in thinking about all this I decided (and that must make it so) that there are four basic Twitter modes: broadcast, network, journal and listen. I don’t know how many modes there were before I decided there were four, but now that I have it’s official and now that it’s official, everyone should understand what they are and in what context they belong. Understanding this is essential to understanding how I understand Twitter, at least for this evening. Understand?

Broadcast Mode

This is the "you" mode, meaning that when I tweet in broadcast mode, it’s about you and when you tweet in broadcast mode it’s about me. If you want lots of followers, you need to be in broadcast mode, which means your updates are for me, and in return you get a soapbox that matters. But if your updates are for you, you’ll never get that soapbox and that’s where most people trying to use Twitter for marketing mess up. They think they’re in broadcast mode, but really they’re in a me mode, which can’t be broadcast mode. Think of it like this: if the major TV networks ran nothing but ads, they wouldn’t really be broadcasting, except in the technical physcial sense of sending their waves out indiscriminantly in hopes that some intelligent alien civilization would receive their message and decide that earthlings should be easy to conquer, because few if any actual earthlings would be watching that drivel. People like me can’t even stand to watch network TV because I find a 7::1 ratio of "you" programming to "me" programming (ads) too low, but it seems to be good enough to draw a large audience. 1::7 is not, yet time and again I see Twitterers attempt to use it that way.

If I’m in broadcast mode, the tweet should be for your benefit seven times out of eight if I want to match the ratio of network television, which is aiming pretty damn low. One time in eight, it can be about "me", but that’s a maximum. If you’re in broadcast mode, you have to ask yourself three questions:

• Am I being interesting and helpful rather than self-promotional?
• Is this update for people who don’t know me except through Twitter?
• Am I really a big enough deal to be in broadcast mode?

Only a few people can meet the last criterion. Oprah is in broadcast mode no matter what, because people will follow her no matter what. Oprah could burp and post "Whoa! Onion rings for lunch. Biggest belch of my life!" and people would be around the photocopier saying "Did you hear about Oprah’s burp?"
"No, where’d you hear about that."
"It was on Twitter. You should follow her."

Everyone else with aspirations of broadcasting should try to meet the first two criteria in 90% of their posts. Badbanana is a good example of a broadcaster. My friend Rand posts a quote or two each day. That’s a perfect broadcast mode usage — he’s offering content that I want. I see this person regularly, but we aren’t networking via Twitter. I’m a consumer of his content and he’s a broadcaster.

Network Mode

Networking is the us mode and it sits between journal and broadcast. It’s not so much to get your word out there, but to get yourself out there and to connect with other people. You can test for network mode with a couple of questions:

• Can I think of a specific person other than myself whom this is for?
• Would I welcome @replies and reply back?

You might have one or six dozen people that you hope will enjoy this particular update, but if it’s six dozen, you can think of one right away who is among the six dozen. If you try to pull one name from your list of followers and draw a blank, you’re probably not in network mode. If you’re not reading and replying to your @replies, you’re definitely not in network mode, you’re broadcasting. Did you mean to broadcast? Is it interesting enough to broadcast? Most often, I’m in network mode, but a huge proportion of my network mode posts are for my wife.

Journal Mode

Journal mode is the opposite of broadcast mode. It’s the me mode. Sometimes I’m in journal mode. I just want to remember something so I tweet it and then mark it as a favorite. When I first started on Twitter, I was in journal mode most of the time, but I’ve been kind of surprised at how quickly this diminshed and how I was soon mostly in network mode and mostly writing for my first two followers (a friend and my wife). If you’re in journal mode, write what you want, when you want. Just don’t expect any followers. Unless you’re an astoundingly interesting person, if you spend too much time in journal mode, even your best friends will abandon you. If what interests you turns out to interest tons of other people, you may get lots of followers, but you may still be in journal mode. You can figure this out easily enough with these two questions:

• If I had no followers, would I write this anyway?
• Am I okay with everyone unfollowing me, even my spouse and best friend, because I’m so fricken boring?

If the answer is yes, you’re in journal mode. Why does it matter? A lot of people spend a lot of time in journal mode, but they would be disappointed if everyone quit following them. Their Twitter stream looks like this:

8:24: having my morning coffee
8:39: threw in a load of laundry. Decided to just mix whites and colors.
8:55: hmm. ruined my white shirt.
9:26: going out shopping for new white shirt.

If you plan to mostly use Twitter in journal mode, updates like that are just fine, but it strikes me that most people with streams like that can’t answer yes to both tests questions. That means they’ve mistaken which mode they’re in. In fact, they want to be in broadcast mode or network mode and they have to think about their updates in those terms.

Sometimes it’s not that different. Today, I tweeted about my morning tea, but I tweeted because I had made my morning tea on my new Trail Designs Ti-Tri stove, which might interest backpackers who care about ultralight camp stoves (significant number of my followers) and I wanted to thank Rand for the stove. So really this was mostly network mode. To some extent it’s also a broadcast mode, since I want to tell everyone about this stove, but realistically, I was looking to tell people I know about the stove and perhaps engage them in discussion about it. So that’s more network than broadcast or journal mode.

Listen Mode

This is an interesting one. In listen mode, you’re reading your stream to see what people you follow have to say, you’re doing searches for stuff that interests you, or you’re actively soliciting opinions. In other words, you might be posting updates in listen mode. So listen mode is not the opposite of broadcast, but might be a complement. Ultimately, though, it’s a better complement to network mode. In many if not most cases, the point of listening is to make contact with others. I might just tweet out "Does anybody know a good cobbler in Berkeley?" A merchant like Zappos with tons of followers might write an update actively soliciting feedback about a change on the website. So it might be conversational, but it’s not social per se. The goal isn’t to make personal connections to people, it’s to get their opinions. But the logical result of listen mode is often to make a connection as a secondary consequence. The test for listen mode is simple:

• Am I trying to gather information or opinions?

A yes answer means you’re in listen mode, even if you’re sending out an update.

Why It Matters

So who cares? Well, if you’re in journal mode, you may be holding yourself back on what you really want to say and record because you think you’re in broadcast mode. More commonly, though, people want to use Twitter for connecting with old friends, connecting with new people who share some interest, or marketing of some sort. In the first case, you’ll likely want to stay mostly in network mode, with some journal mode because your old friends actually care. In the second case, you want to be mostly in network mode. If you’re marketing, be clear on whether you’re trying to really connect with your customers, or just broadcast to them. It may evolve over time. When you first start, maybe you can connect with all of your customers, but over time, you’ll be forced into broadcast mode because you can’t really network with 20,000 people. But remember that broadcast mode is not advertising mode. There is no advertising mode on Twitter yet, but I see so many marketers who mistake broadcast mode for advertising mode, and think that broadcast is the me mode, not the you mode, which is why Twitter does nothing for them except waste everyone’s time.

I am not an early adopter of new modes of communication, except email. I still don’t really use a cell phone even though reception is improving in my area. I never did get on MySpace. But I have had some great reconnections on Facebook, and lately I’ve been dipping my toes in Twitter. But to some extent, Twitter is a fog in my mind and I’ve been trying to figure out what I like and why I do what I do there and to try to write it down to make sense of if all. This is Part I: Practice, which includes how I use Twitter, why I follow people, why I block people. In Part II: Theory, I try to wrap my head around what I see as the four modes of Twitter that you can’t get wrong.

How I Use Twitter

First off, don’t follow me. If you don’t already have my phone number and email address, you’ll probably be disappointed by my Twitter stream, and even if you do know me well enough to have those things, you still might be disappointed. If you’re thinking of unfollowing me, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t stay on topic unless the topic is "random thoughts that cross Tom’s mind". I see my audience as my wife, some friends, and strangely, myself. My Twitter stream is a bit of a diary — a cool link, a random thought, a quote I like, a local event. I don’t expect to have an army followers and I’m not trying to build up a Twitter empire that I can leverage to get you to buy my açai berry treatment for flatulence. Just recently, I found out that a local non-profit that I think does great stuff is in rough financial shape (Yosemite Assocation). I tweeted in hopes that my few followers would retweet my donation reminder to their many followers and get some money rolling in. Other than that one time, I’ve never wanted anyone other than a handful for friends to follow me and I only follow a few people who are not friends.

Who I follow is another matter. If you’re trying to use Twitter to connect, here’s how I do things. I’m just one guy, perhaps completely atypical of the average Twitter user, but if you are looking to create a Twitter empire that includes me, you might want to read this.

Why I Might Just Block You

In a word: spam. At first it was a complete mystery why people who don’t know me would follow me. How were they finding me? As near as I can tell, most of them have alerts for some keyword and they habitually follow anyone who triggers their alerts. Some of these people trigger on words relating to Yosemite. That’s fine. I expect they’ll be fundamentally disappointed and unfollow me eventually because, as noted above, I do not stay on topic, but that’s their decision. I certainly don’t hold it against them and some people don’t mind a low signal to noise ratio. If that’s you, welcome aboard.

When I do hold it against them is when they clearly don’t even read the update that triggers the alert. For example, after Ben Bernanke said the economy could recover in late 2009, I said that a pterodactyl could attack New York. A spammer who triggers on New York started following me. At the height of it’s absurdity, I mentioned "browns" as in non-native brown trout that are eating native frogs in Sierra lakes and I immediately got followed by someone who Twitters about the Cleveland Browns. Of course, this didn’t help his brand because I thought "What a [expletive deleted] idiot". I block these people and can see that eventually Twitter will need real spam filters.

Why I Will Follow You

A lot of people are marketing via Twitter and some outright are spamming. I suppose that’s their right, but you have to know how to do it.

Personally, I like to only follow as many people as I can read, so at a certain point, if I follow more people, I have to get rid of some. Second, if I follow you, it’s because I want to follow you and not because I care, at least initially, whether you follow me back. I’m not interesting to 99.9999% of the planet and I’m certainly not interesting to everyone that I find interesting. I don’t expect you to reciprocate just because I follow you and, frankly, I probably won’t reciprocate just because you follow me. You have to be interesting in some way and here’s what makes you interesting to me:

• You are a friend of mine or perhaps my wife. If you were in town and didn’t call me would I be bummed? If yes, then I probably do want to know that you’re enjoying your morning tea or are frustrated at work and all the little details of your life that I’m otherwise missing. Thanks for being better about keeping your friends in the loop than I am. If you’re not my friend and you tweet about everything that passes between your lips, I won’t follow you.
• You are inherently interesting even to strangers. Maybe I don’t know you, but you’re just plain funny like Tim Siedel, aka @badbanana or you have a high percentage of your tweets on topics I care about. I’m interested in hiking and wildflowers in Yosemite, so I follow several Yosemite Twitterers I don’t know.
• You engage. If you have no @replies, you had better stay on topic (like SkiingExaminer, who does engage a lot, but I would follow him either way because he sticks to skiing. No posts about his morning cup of Joe there). The importance of engagement surprised me. I didn’t really see it until I started thinking more carefully about my behavior. I enjoyed Mike Linder’s presence on Twitter, so we started trading @replies. Then I finally hunted him down and cornered him at his workplace. I’m glad I did. Nice guy. And he said he was glad I did too, but would I please lower my weapon.
• You update occasionally rather than constantly. I’m not sure what my limit is, but if you update more than 10 times per day over the long term, I’m probably going to unfollow you unless you’re fricken brilliant. If you’re updating every fifteen minutes, you must be bringing me closer to enlightenment, riches or ice cream with every update.

One last comment on auto-responders. Somehow, you may have decided that you should send a welcome message to everyone who follows you. I find that getting an automatic message from a computer is a sweet and wonderful experience.