All you writers are being too effective with your author Twitter accounts. Some of you are even getting readers. This is because you are not doing all the things that make your Twitter account fully ineffective.
Forget the 80% content 20% fun rule – this is how you make sure that your author Twitter account is fully ineffective.
Post a book link every morning
Make sure you post your book cover and amazon link daily. If they see it enough times, they will start buying it. That’s not begging at all. How else will people know this is an author Twitter account?
You know what? Once a day is not enough. Screw variety and interest-based posts – share your book hourly. Block anyone who complains or says you seem desperate. What do they know anyway? They probably think your very important book tweets are spamming up their timeline or something.
Cat pictures solve everything
Give your followers a change of pace with a cat picture while you take your mid-morning tea or coffee break. Everyone is sharing cat pictures so it must be what followers want to seem right?
Anyone who says that cat tweets should be an occasional cute off-topic post have not met your cat. Everyone else is posting cat pictures – why are you any different? If you have not got a cat, get some stock cat images.
Focus only on your Twitter follower count
The only metric that matters for an ineffective author Twitter account is how many followers you have. Things like genuine relationships, human interaction, or actual interest are for losers.
Do whatever you have to in order to make that number as big as possible. This has no downsides (for an ineffective account).
#WritersLift – drop your links
This hashtag is where writers go to get other writers to follow them so that their follower count rises. Everyone knows writers are your primary audience even if they like or only read other genres. Your book is different. They need it.
Banish all thoughts of terms like “ineffective audience” and “follower inflation”. Dismiss ideas like “social capital” (the mean average value of follower in terms of the attention they pay to you). Say nothing about silly ideas like quality over quantity. #WritersLift is a legitimate marketing strategy and not a lot of desperate people following each other.
Your author Twitter account needs followers at any cost. Book sales, pfft – followers is how you keep score.
Daily updates on your next follower milestone
Your followers are clearly invested in your success as a writer as you are. After all your book will change the world one day. Until then, you need more people who will see your daily book links. This is why you need to ask your existing followers to help you get to that next milestone. Your author Twitter account is something everyone wants to help you with.
Anyone who says tweets like this are off-putting is not in your corner.
Work on your author Twitter not your next book
Your time is not best spent writing another book. It is best spent working on your Twitter follower count. Only when millions of Twitter users have brought your current book is it time to put pen to paper again.
News of another book will only confuse readers. You need them focused on buying your current book. Any person that says that readers that love a book seek out other books by the same writer do not understand Twitter.
Having a bad day – post gifs
When the nagging depression that you only sold 6 book this year gets too much, make sure to get your fanatical followers to post funny and cute gifs to cheer you up. Each one of those gifs is a reader that just needs more convincing.
Ignore all grammar and writing conventions
Demonstrate your quality as a writer by daring to not write well on Twitter. After all, Twitter is no place to demonstrate your ability to say profound things with words. What are you, a writer or something?
- Spell “your” as “UR”
- Use lots of exclamation marks!!!!
- Include ASCII emoji 😉 to show your light and fun side
- Always spell “please” as “plz”
- Start sentences with “And” because it looks cool
Imitate the author Twitter accounts you follow
All those #WritersLift tweets you have been part of should be filling your timeline with other writer’s book links. Obviously, these deluded souls don’t know about your book, yet. They “must be doing something right” so be sure to post exactly the same sort of content that they post.
Anyone who talks about standing out or “being remarkable” does not have your best interests at heart. We are trying to be ineffective, not stand out.
Be sure to post lots of nice things about the #writingcommunity
Be sure to thank the lovely and friendly #writingcommunity nice and often. You don’t even need to mean it – just so long as you get your fix of likes and retweets. After all, it is writers and not your readers who need to follow you.
Strictly sweet tweets to pick up likes from other writers is the best way to make your Twitter account seem active. After all, who takes the time to find readers who are not writers? That’s just crazy talk.
Use all the hashtags
Get your tweet seen by making sure it is more hashtags than content. After all, you want people to notice you.
Anyone who talks about writing focused or targeted content is just a killjoy. Just like anyone who demands you only use relivant hashtags does not understand how cross-topic you can be.
If someone says this looks like spam – block them.
Post links with only hashtags
Context is for losers. When you share a link, hashtag it to the maximum character count and let the readers figure out why it should matter to them.
Being an author on Twitter means never having to explain anything.
Never be too proud to beg
When sales, retweets, and followers are showing up too slowly, it never hurts to get people. Beg them to buy your book. Beg for five-star Amazon reviews. Plead for followers. Demand retweets with a “Plz RT” – especially on your daily book links.
Begging is just part of your marketing style. If anyone says it is shameful and ineffective, show them the door.
Use gifs to get attention
Pictures grab attention, right? So obviousely animated images grab even more attention. Post a gif in every tweet – that’s the power move.
Moreover, if you use different gifs – especially gifs unrelated to your tweet – you can get away with posting the same thing every day or so. No one reads the text anyway.
Quote from your book but use the same three quotes
Someone probably told you that you might get interest from readers by sharing quotes from your book. Did they also tell you that you should only use three quotes on rotation? If they did not tell you this, they might have been trying to trick you into being effective or something.
Be sure to only ever use the same few quotes over and over.
Share images with quotes from other authors
You know what your author Twitter timeline needs more of – inspirational quotes about writing. All those lists of quotes from authors out there are just begging for you to copy and paste them into an image. Quick content. Easy retweets. Your readers will love it.
Quoting other authors shows that you know what you are doing as a writer. Who cares if the author writes in a different genre? It’s all good (free) content. Slap that quote on a stock image and you are good to go.
You can reuse that image on instagram later too.
Terrible advice? What do you mean by that?
I mean, yeah sure, if you want to reach readers this is bad advice. If you want to be the biggest author Twitter account that all the other author Twitter accounts follow, then this is the way my friends.
You could post content that is relevant to your target audience. That means figuring out who your target audience is. No one has time for that.
Yes, sure, you could invest time in coming up with novel or interesting content to share. Why spend time on quality when Twitter is clearly a quantity only game, right?
Be interesting? We’re not interesting, we are people selling books. Who has time for a life when there are likes and retweets to get?
Only do some of these things sometimes? What half-baked nonsense is this? Who has the time to make quality content people actually want to see? That sounds like you are saying keep your fluff content to 20% – we will have none of that ” all things in moderation” lark here.
Have conversations with people? On social media? Are you kidding? Authors don’t have conversations – we have books to sell.
Curate relationships? What are you talking about? There are so few books on the market that people follow authors on Twitter to find something to read. Those readers are so desperate, they will read whatever junk we post to Twitter. That is how the world works, isn’t it?
Now get out there and make your author Twitter account as ineffective as you possibly can.
Fantastically terrible advice.