How to Market Your Book on Twitter With BookBuzzr

As some of you know, BookBuzzr offers 4 ways to market your book on Twitter. You can set up all 4 ways to market your book in less than 15 minutes.  In short, you can:

1. Tweet about your book when you set it up on BookBuzzr – This is a one time tweet.
2. Tweet about your book when it’s read by a minimum number of readers in a 24 hour period.
3. Tweet about your book daily or weekly.
4. Set up milestone-based tweets (think of this as a little Twitter celebration when the reader count for your book reaches 100, 1,000 and 10,000.)

Recently, Derek Haines wrote an article about how Indie authors hold double standards and treat their books as special while treating the works of other indie authors with disdain. In this article, Derek mentioned that some of these authors have been promoting their book on Twitter in a spam-like way using BookBuzzr’s built-in ‘book-tweeting’ service. Derek was kind enough to run the article by us before publishing it (Thank you Derek). And we used the opportunity to clarify a few things on the article. Our key clarifications are reproduced below:

1. The Book Tweeting service is intended to provide an additional layer of promotion for authors on Twitter that are already providing significant value to their followers. In other words, if you are an author on Twitter and are already engaging in a conversation with others on Twitter, and if the Book Tweeting service sends a tweet once every few days,then it’s likely to not be considered spam. However, if an author does nothing else but set-up their book-tweeting service to send out tweets, then that author will be having a serious problem and will lose followers.
2. Also, the book tweeting service is something that can be turned on or off by authors. In fact there are three separate settings inside the Book Tweeting service of BookBuzzr from which the author can choose. Most technology (such as email auto-responders, mass SMS sending services, fax, cellphones, Facebook etc.) can be used for good or can be misused. Many of our authors appear to be using the service correctly (in effect, the vast majority of them send out a number of informative or entertaining tweets interspersed with automated tweets from BookBuzzr.) A few others need to be educated about how to use twitter in general and the BookBuzzr Book Tweeting service in particular. We will spend some time in creating guidelines to educate authors and also think about how we can spam-proof the technology.

If you are an author using BookBuzzr’s automated book tweeting service, please follow these guidelines:

1. Be creative in your Twitter messaging – BookBuzzr offers default messages to tweet about your book. Please do not stick to these messages. These default messages are only to help you get started. Change it and make it relevant to your own Twitter audience.
2. Engage and Entertain – You would not watch a TV channel if it ran ads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You watch channels that offer entertainment and information. Then they show you an ad or two. Similarly, you should strive to entertain your audience, provide them with relevant information and engage in the conversations. Then if your audience occasionally see tweets about your book, they are less likely to be irritated by your book promotion efforts.
3. Do not post duplicate updates to your account. Repeatedly posting the same message is considered spam. To decide how often to post a message during the day, just ask yourself how often would you want to see something similar from others.
4. Do not cross-post the same message from multiple accounts. It makes you look less original and clogs up peoples streams.
5. Avoid sending too many book marketing tweets in quick succession, it tends to look like spam.
6. Involve your followers and fans in promoting your book. If your book has been tweeted by a fan make sure to drop a thank you and also engage them in a conversation.
7. One way to engage with your readers without spamming them is to go through your book and pull out various messages or quotes with each consisting of 140 characters or less. Once you have assembled enough of these quotes BookBuzzr will help you automatically send out these quotes or messages.
8. Disable if you are going to be away from Twitter for a few days – If you are going away on holiday, are not keeping well or are simply taking a break from your online book marketing efforts, please make it a point to disable BookBuzzr’s book -tweeting service. It takes just 30 seconds to disable your the automated book marketing tweets that go out on Twitter but it will save your followers from being inundated with promotional messages about your book.