A Novel Marketing Idea Involving Twitter...

The other night just before I went to bed after a full day of #PitMad, I remembered I had an Excel spreadsheet of people who'd tweeted my tweets in previous Twitter pitch parties like #PitMad, #SFFPit, #PitchMas, etc. I hadn't updated it in awhile, so I spent this morning going through tweets from Thursday's #PitMad and from the last #SFFPit in June (next one's in December) and adding a whole bunch of people's Twitter handles to my spreadsheet.

Why do this, you ask? Well, when the book(s) are actually published, these people might be interested in reading and especially reviewing. After all, they wouldn't have retweeted my pitches if they weren't interested, right?

(Okay, some of them might have retweeted because I retweeted theirs and not because they really loved the concept, but better too many people than too few. Plus even if they don't want it themselves, they might retweet.)

So when the time comes, whether I go indie (which I'm thinking about doing with Battle for the Wastelands) or traditional (an agent asked for the full manuscript of The Thing in the Woods), I'll have 60+ people to tweet the link to--and many thousands of their followers if they retweet. For each story. :)

Word to the wise if you implement this strategy yourself--don't tweet the same tweet to too many people. I got kicked off Twitter for an hour a couple years ago for trying to promote "Illegal Alien" to too many people too fast. It's called "spamming." :)

And definitely don't be stalkery or pesky. You don't want to get on people's nerves to the point they don't want to participate in these kinds of things again.

And I'd be willing to help promote others, not just use others to promote me. I saw a lot of really good concepts out there in the Twitter pitch parties and retweeted them all when I was able (i.e. not in class or in a job that was picky about social media). I'd definitely be up for doing this myself if someone decides to contact me about a novel they pitched online.

So that's another bit of advice--be willing to do this yourself to help others. Pay it back and pay it forward. Remember, the writing community isn't that large.