Twitter is an extremely useful platform in helping the self-published author gain more exposure about their work. Every author needs to be on Twitter and here is why.

You can promote your book on Twitter by sending out tweets to your followers and by using a hashtag such as #book and #author. As well as all of your followers being able to see your tweet, anyone searching for the words 'book' or 'author' will also stumble upon it. However, if you are completely new to Twitter, how do you go about gaining followers? Well, the easiest way to do this is to set yourself up as an author, so create an author profile and get networking. Go and search for authors who write in a similar genre to your own, find readers, and look for reading groups and publication houses. Basically search for anyone who is interested in books. Once you have found people and followed them, hopefully they will follow you back and over time you should gain more followers.

The thing with Twitter though is that you have to be active and engage with your followers. This is particularly true of all social media but with Twitter your tweet only has a short lifespan and will soon be forgotten as people scroll down the page so you need to update often. However, having said this, you do not want to constantly post ‘buy my book’ as this is a sure way to alienate people. So how do you network and get people interested in your work?

This is simply by posting informative and interesting tweets. If you are interesting, people will follow you and find out more. You also need to be consistent and make people aware that you are an author so this needs to be reflected in your Twitter name and Twitter handle ( the @name) so for example Michael Smith could be simply, MichaelSmith, @MichaelSmith, you just need to keep it simple. Also make sure that the info about yourself describes you as an author and use the hashtag, so for example, #Author of (Book name) #writer of historical fiction, that sort of thing; you can also add your author website and blog if you have one. This way people can easily find out more information about you if they so wish.

As Twitter is a social media site, you do indeed need to be social and part of this is sharing others' interesting posts and info. You will also find that by doing so people will share your information. You need to be subtle when posting tweets, you want people to be aware of your presence. Engaging with others and posting links to interesting events and current news events will make you interesting and also current, and this is what people want. There are thousands of authors on Twitter all promoting their books so you need to be a little bit more creative when trying to find those potential new readers.