Tweaking Tweets for Your Books

Most authors know that when they have a new book or other promotion to do, tweeting about it can really help to get the news out. Of course, we are all assuming that you know better than to do nothing BUT tweet "buy this book" constantly. You don't want to annoy people and there is nothing worse than someone whose tweets consist solely of requests to buy their book (or whatever product they are selling). Bleh.

But if you have a new book coming out or are running a contest, you can use Twitter as part of your

promotional arsenal. This entire blog is really about a single tip. A very obvious tip and one I should have thought of YEARS ago, but I didn't. And I suspect that a lot of you have not thought about it either.

The Tip
When you compose your tip, use your website for your link, not the actual buy link at Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, or wherever.

Why would you do that? Easy.

But let me digress for a moment.

Your Website
This sidebar is just to say that on your website, you should have a page for each of your books. On that page, you should have the following information:

• The cover of your book (just 'cause it looks nice)
• A blurb about your book
• A teaser or excerpt, or even a link to the entire first chapter
• Links to all the places where your book can be purchased

The item in red is why I digressed for a moment.

Back to Tweaking your Tweet
So...when you tweet about your book, you use that book's webpage from your website for the link, not a specific vendor.

That way, a single tweet will work for everyone versus having to do a tweet for each vendor's buy link or worse, trying to squeeze all the links into a tweet.

Remember, you don't want to flood the tweetverse with dozens of tweets just to be able to include links for all the places where a reader can find your book. You'll just annoy your audience. Worse, if the reader has a Nook and you are constantly sending out Amazon Kindle links, that reader may just decide not to follow you because s/he doesn't feel like weeding through the morass of tweets you send out, searching for the one that has the link for the Nook.

Your goal is to give folks helpful and fun info, not aggravate them.

That's it. Now go out and work it, baby!