Selling books with Twitter
is both fun and profitable!

Selling books with Twitter takes planning and a desire to socialize and be helpful. You don’t actually sell on Twitter, you entice people to your website or blog. That is where you promote or sell your book.

What is It?

It is a micro-blog. Each post is called a tweet. Tweets are limited to 140 characters. Once in a while I find 140 characters a bit constraining, but most of the time it works just fine.

You can keep your conversations restricted to your circle of friends or colleagues, or open them up to the Twitterverse. You can read everyone’s tweets on the Timeline, or read only the tweets from people you are following, or go back and forth.

How to Use It

It is easy to use. Your user name is limited to 15 characters with no spaces. Your bio is limited to 160 characters. You can add a link (1) to your website or blog.

You need to plan ahead so that everything you do is focused on your goal of selling books. I’m trying to get people to my blog, where I have sample stories from my book.

My user name is David_Griffiths. My 160 character bio reads: Author of “The Misadventures of Russell Quigley,” funny short stories; and the Self-Publishing-Solutions website, where you learn to publish for free.

As you can see, my focus is on my website; yours should be on selling books, which can also be accomplished by focusing on a website. If your book’s title is 15 characters or less, I would use it as your user name.

If you plan on writing many books, or have already written many books, you may want to use your real name, if it isn’t taken.

If you have a blog or a website devoted to your book, or your books theme (and you should have), you may want to work that into your user name.

A little fore thought can keep you from getting off on the wrong foot. Your user name is exposed to the entire Twitterverse everytime you tweet, so it is important to get it right. The same is true of your bio. Don’t try to squeeze your life into 160 characters; it can’t be done. Sell your book! Make the people looking at your home page want to learn more about you and your book. Entice them to visit your website or blog.

When you click on your home page, you will see all of the tweets of the people you are following. If you want to see everyones tweets, type everyone into the search box.

How to Choose People to Follow

My favorite way to locate people I want to follow is to search on the topics I am interested in. When I search on self-publishing, I am presented with a long list of tweets on self-publishing. I click on each name to look at all of the tweets on their home page. When I am satisfied that we share mutual interests, I click on the Follow button.

Eventually, I will search on every aspect of self-publishing,including selling books.

If you are familiar with the leaders in your industry, be sure to follow them also. Search for them by their real name or their user name.

Tweeting to a target audience is the logical way to gain targeted followers. It is important to check out their home pages. For example, my search on self-publishing turned up a programmer who self-publishes software.

Some people will follow you back automatically. Some people will follow you only if you are interesting or helpful. I follow people with mutual interests because they are usually both interesting and helpful.

How to Get Followers

If you follow the above procedure for following people, many of them will folow you back automattically. The rest is up to your tweets. If your tweets are interesting or really helpful, new people will follow you every day.

Another way to get the ball rolling is to join in conversations. You do that by using the @ symbal before a user’s name. That puts your tweet on their home page in addition to the showing it to the Twitterverse.

I believe the more followers you have, the more books you can sell, so I use Tweet Adder to automatically increase the number of interested followers. by using Tweet Adder to auto follow on twitter I went from 304 followers to over 3000 followers in 60 days.