I didn't mean to not post anything for the past two weeks. I've been posting about once a week. I have no excuse. I procrastinated! I've done this before, not necessarily on my blog but just in life otherwise. I was going to write that being a procrastinator means I am a PROFESSIONAL crastinator. I thought I was just being humorous because everyone knows there is no such thing as crastinate. Well, GUESS WHAT? I looked it up just for the hell of it and it's a word! Everyplace I checked said it was an obsolete form of procrastinate. So. . . after years of practice I think I have become a professional crastinator! Well, enough of that. What else should I write about in this post???
How about Twitter? After reading all kinds of stuff about how writers can use Twitter and how it can benefit them, etc. I decided to quit avoiding Twitter and to dive in and check it out. So, a couple months ago I established a Twitter account, called myself @lehmanauthor and emerged into the "Twitterverse." Here's how it's going...
I have almost 500 followers and I am also following most of them. I have found some very witty, thoughtful, serious, sincere and otherwise interesting people. I enjoy reading the witty, funny, informative, crazy and thought-provoking tweets. I seem to have established a rapport with several people on Twitter. We pay attention to each others tweets and respond back and forth with questions and answers. I've learned several things.
There are a bunch of writers on twitter who seem intent on the singular goal of accumulating as many followers as possible. They have thousands or tens of thousands of followers. They plainly state they follow back anyone who follows them and many of them are continually doing "writers lifts" where they encourage everyone to post their book titles, and follow back everyone who does so in a big writers orgy (my word) and stating things like "I almost have 500 followers" or "I just need twenty more to reach 1000 followers." These are not famous writers and some of them haven't published anything most people have heard of. Some of them are struggling writers (aren't we all?} who haven't published anything. (The big name writers such as Stephen King have millions and the don't do writers lifts.)
There are a bunch of "writers" who have thousands of followers and many promise to buy and read each others books. I don't believe most of them about reading many books. I suppose most of them started on Twitter to push their books and/or to join a community of writers to learn more about the writing craft, to share things about the life of being a writer, and to elevate and to spread the word to help promote their writing. It seems to me that many of them must be too busy chasing after followers to spend much time actually writing or even reading.
When I tweet something whether it's about my book, or the book I'm querying to agents or just a random entertaining question or a quote about writing or whatever I get MAYBE one or two responses.
Random fact: There are a lot of writing people from the UK and Scotland on Twitter. I don't know why or if that means anything, but I've noticed it.
Many people who interact with the writing community on Twitter state in their profiles a lot of qualities about themselves but it does not appear they are writers, but I assume at least some of them are probably readers, which is something important us writers. We can't just have other writers interested in our books -- we need readers!
So I think I've discovered the key to my tweets receiving some kind of attention. I need to participate in every writers lift and indiscriminately follow anyone and everyone to get my follower numbers into the multi-thousands. I think I can achieve this by devoting all the time I should be using for writing to chasing after Twitter followers. And what about my original purpose of being on Twitter to help promote and raise awareness of my writing? Well, that's okay. . . I can figure out some other avenue for that. I will just procrastinate on my writing even more than I already do. The main think now is just need eighteen more followers to reach 500! Let's do a writers lift!!!
BRAIN MATTER FROM BRIAN