Having finished your masterpiece you’ve got a nagging feeling that there’s something missing? Yes, an audience! If money is no object then this guide is not for you, but if you need to sell as many books as possible to make money quick then read on for how to promote your book on X in 2024!
Before I start I should say this article is based on a little research and what I have learnt since I joined in June 2022, so less than two years, and gaining 2000 genuine followers, so if you have more than that, I’m sure you’re better at this than I, so this won’t be of much use to you. I should also say that this method is not based on any tricks involving bots or ‘list follow backs’ (although I tried that briefly), but rather growing a genuine audience organically, which may be slower, but more worthwhile and profitable in the long-term.
Time to read: 13 mins
Total Words: 1238
X Level: Novice – Assumed no knowledge of X.
CONTENTS
1. a) What and b) how often and when to tweet?
a) Twitter rule of thirds:
– 1/3 Promotions for your books
– 1/3 Personal Stories
– 1/3 Informative insights from experts or influencers
b) How often and when to tweet?
1. a) What and b) how often and when to tweet?
a) Twitter rule of thirds
⅓ of tweets promote your business
⅓ share personal stories
⅓ are informative insights from experts or influencers
Promotions for your books
Applying the twitter rule of thirds to authors, a third of your tweets will be variations on promotions for your books. I state ‘variations’ because you should never use the same headline twice; it is actually against the terms of your account to repeat your own tweets, although X does allow you to physically retweet your own post once.
Many simply post the amazon link of their book which is http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/ASIN [Replace ASIN with your Amazon ASIN code, for example, mine is B0CNYCRD5X ie. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CNYCRD5X] and it looks like this on X:
I only did this for demonstration purposes for this article, and I don’t actually like this method. The cover is clear and the title is emboldened at the bottom, which is good, but it seems bland and lacking in any atmosphere, don’t you think? Would you buy my book based on this? I doubt it. I wouldn’t based on this and I know how much blood sweat and tears went into writing this over a year. So I think it is far better to think of your promotional tweets as a Campaign with a theme.
How did I determine my theme? You need to summarize the essential Unique Selling Point of your story, and the easiest way to explain this is to show you how I did it for my book.
My story is basically true crime. I was arrested for downloading indecent images of children in real life, which is about the worse thing I think you can be arrested for, short of rape or murder, and probably just like you now, nobody believed me when I said I was innocent; the mere accusation is enough to convince most people I was guilty even though I wasn’t!
Eight hundred men a month are arrested in the UK for the same crime, so I am not the only one, and if you watch porn, you could be next!
I refused a plea bargain and pleaded not guilty in court determined to fight to prove my innocence.
My book is called “The Knock” because the police knock on your door unannounced to arrest you and confiscate all your devices. The story covers what happened from my arrest – to investigation – to trial, and the devastating effect on my career, wife and family. It was a living nightmare, a true horror. And that’s how I identified my theme: “True Story. True Horror.”
A campaign involves a series of posts on a theme — which became my tagline — with different headlines, so you are never repeating yourself, or boring your loyal followers. You must be really careful NOT to blindly tweet the same text and image because not only is it against X’s terms, but if you annoy followers, they will probably just mute you, which means hide all your future posts, and unlike unfollowing you, you have no way of knowing they’ve done this.
The various headlines in my campaign included:
“Max was just like you or me. Perfect job, wife and child; all gone in a knock. True Story. True Horror.”
“What have you got to lose? Imagine everything. True Story. True Horror.
“Nothing can prepare you for The Knock. True Story. True Horror.”
“Escape, through HIS. True Story. True Horror.”
Personal Stories
A third of your tweets should be personal stories. This is a hard one to get right because I think a lot of people get it wrong. How many people do you think are interested in your daily aches and pains, worsening arthritis, or a blow-by-blow daily update on your treatment for cancer? Don’t get me wrong, there are some fascinating longer-form daily blogs about people’s struggles with illness, but putting that into a short-form of one-hundred and fifty characters every day doesn’t seem to do it justice and may alienate some, however sympathetic. Try to strike a balance between humility and attention-seeking. You want to show your humanity without being downright miserable all of the time, because, let’s face it, life can be pretty miserable on its own sometimes, without any help!
Make observations on life, share wistful thoughts, upsets, hopes and dreams even, but try not to cross the line. Someone once tweeted, ‘I really wish I could just get another six followers to make it two thousand.’ And then the next day, ‘I really wish I could just sell another two books of poetry to meet my weekly target.’ And then the next day, ‘I really wish I could sign up another three subscribers.’ And so on and so forth, presumably, because I muted her pretty quickly after that, so I can but guess! If you can employ humour I personally think it helps, at least trying to employ humour helps me keep a perspective on things!
Informative insights from experts or influencers
A third of your tweets should be informative insights from experts or influencers. What does that mean? Well it doesn’t mean influencers in general, like beautiful fashion models, but rather experts or influencers within your field, which in this case means, ideally, established authors. But since you are unlikely to ever get noticed by Stephen King or J.K. Rowling (who I blame for the popularity of abbreviated initials among female authors!) on social media, you will probably settle for the next best thing which is notice from the greatest twitter-author-influencers, meaning they have a humungous number of followers on twitter even though they may be unheard of elsewhere! The logic being that if they could only retweet your pinned tweet (that post you keep at the top of your profile which has a magnet eg. offer or discount for your book) then all your problems in life would be solved.
Nicky Shearsby – Twitter-Author-Influencer – 69K Followers!!!
You can’t just direct message them and ask them to help, well, I suppose you could in theory, but most people, including me, find DM’s offensive. So you need to identify your dozen twitter-author-influencers, follow them, and on a rotational basis, engage them with intelligent comments on their posts, and retweets, in the hope they notice and follow you, and even return the favour sometime by retweeting your pinned post. I always reciprocate if someone retweets my pinned post out of courtesy (unless they’re a bot – surprise coming if you hang around to the end!)
b) How often and when to tweet?
You should tweet at least three times a day without repeating yourself, which should be relatively easy if you aim for one promotional post, one personal story post and one Informative insight from an influencer every day. If you plan your 21-day promotional campaign in advance, you can schedule the tweets on twitter in advance. You write the tweet or post the image as normal and then click to the right of the smiley icon at the bottom left on an icon which will highlight ‘schedule’ when your cursor crosses it. It’s that easy, you really don’t need any special scheduling software.
21-day promotional campaign
After I designed all my nine posts on Gimp, I scheduled one every day for five days, then one every other day for four days, and then one every three days for twelve days. The reason behind this is firstly, that people need to see a product at least five times before they will consider buying it, and secondly, short-term memory declines without reminders at increasing intervals. This is a way to hopefully keep the message fresh and in people’s minds without overdoing it and annoying my beautiful, kind and cherished followers.
What are the best times to tweet?
According to a survey, “Best Times to Post on Social Media in 2023”, by Sprout Social, the best times to tweet for maximum engagement in the US are:
- Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Fridays 9 a.m. to noon
However, back in 2016, Buffer analysed 4.8m tweets to establish the best times to tweet in the US for maximizing your chance to get more clicks:
“Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most clicks on average.”
“The highest number of clicks per tweet occurs between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.”
This seems to go against the research from Sprout Social. The best time for you to tweet may be different to both of these depending on your target audience. It might be useful varying the time you post, and repost, to test which times get the best reaction.
Don’t forget to use hashtags
Always use hashtags to pick up potential asynchronous viewers. To be honest, I tend to overdo this, and I’ve read that it is best to use one or two well-targeted hashtags rather than ten like me! You will quickly learn which are the most popular hashtags but to save you time here’s a quick list of the most popular at the moment:
For Readers: #reader, #readers, #readingcommunity
For Writers: #writer #writers #writerslife #writingcommunity #writerslift #writersoftwitter
If you begin typing after entering a hashtag you will see all the suggestions come up below. You can also see what’s trending on X on the right of your page under the heading, “What’s happening”.
Hashtags work when people search twitter for a particular topic. But the problem, obviously, is that once a hashtag becomes more popular, the chances of your post appearing near the top when people search, is increasingly unlikely. When you’re starting out, though, I think they are especially important to grow beyond that first 100 of your friends and family.
Firstly, you need to spend time preparing the groundwork on X, and thinking carefully about how you will present your name and face to the world, which we looked at in Part One, in order to appeal to your target audience. Secondly, you need to engage with your target audience by posting promotional, personal and influencer content on a regular basis, without repeating yourself, three times a day, which we looked at in Part Two. Finally, we considered the best times to post your content based on recent and historic research and suggested testing this at different times to find the best time for your audience.
Thank you for reading, and to reward you for getting this far, I promised a surprise, so this is your free bonus:
Q&A Everything you need to know about bots
Q. How do you recognise a bot?
A. Username usually consists of one forename followed by many digits, a fake/AI photo of an attractive woman, and many many more following than followers.
Q. What do bots post?
A. All posts are usually retweets.
Q. What is the purpose of bots?
A. After you follow them, they send Direct Messages to you for pornographic websites.
Q. Are there any other clues they’re a bot?
A. Check their replies. If it’s nothing but likes and retweets they may be a bot. And they usually lack a bio, although, this is changing and some bots have bio’s now. Finally, their Join date may not match up with their follower count (either a new account with way too many followers, or an old account with too few),
I hope you enjoyed this free bonus!
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