Saturday, April 7, 2012

Why Twitter, Why?

So I gave Twitter a try. I really did. I spent hours going through tweets, and checking out who followed and who was being followed. I found a ton of romance and erotica authors. Seemed cool on the surface, I even followed some. Do you know what I discovered? Almost every single person I am following spends way too much time hawking their own products. My feed is bombarded with advertisements for other people's books. Really? Is it all some kind of opt-in advertising? It sucks.

I would feel like a douche pimping out my books like that. I understand that you have to get your name out, but does every single tweet have to be "Buy my book!" or a retweet of someone else's (who they just happen to be following)? Call me stupid, but I thought tweeting was mini-blogging, somewhere I could get cool info in snippets. One tweet promised to explain using Twitter as a sales tool, but when I opened the link, it was an advertisement for his book about using Twitter. I clicked on the book to see what it was all about, but when I saw it's ranking I immediately exited out and haven't opened a single tweet link from this "social media expert" since. All of my own titles (even those under different pen names) have higher rankings than the book that's supposed to show me how to get higher sales. Uh, no.

The thing that really icked me out, though, was the descriptions so many of these authors put on their bio. "Best-selling Author" and "Award Winning Author" turns me right off, and I refuse to follow them-even some whose books I like. I much prefer funny bios, or at least something about the person doing the tweeting. I suspect a lot of these "Best Sellers" just have a hapless intern tweeting the "Buy my book" spiel, and that's just lame.


2 comments:

  1. I use Twitter to post links to my articles and for the entries into different blog contests. That's pretty much it. Oh and then I also find all the funny twitter posts and put them on my blog each Wednesday. lol

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  2. I'm trying to be less grumpy about Twitter. These days I'm finding it a lot easier to skim over the self-promo (but I can't escape it all).

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