I often get asked by authors how to connect with people that will read my book. While it is a slightly painstaking thing to do once you get set up and look in the right places you can find readers on Twitter. A big time wasting mistake is to follow other authors at random. I am sure you have other friends that are authors and thats ok but don’t go following other authors just thinking their fans will buy your book.
The key is to follow authors in your genre. If you are writing Harry Potter like books wouldn’t it make sense to follow some people that are following J.K. Rowling? Twitter has a good search tool to find people that are similar to you or have the same interest. Make sure you are logged into Twitter and click on the Who to Follow tool. You are bound to find authors in your genre hat have a big following. You can also get to this from your profile page. See the Yellow Arrow and red circle in the picture below.
Finding Your Writing Genre Followers
Once you view the recommended followers on Twitter you will get to a screen that looks like this. For the sake of this article lets say we are writing in the thriller genre. I would think that following and account called eBookThrillers would be a good place to start. We go and follow them since they are in the genre. They are not an author but a service that helps people find the best thrillers. This is like hitting the jackpot.
Looks like we have found a great place to start. They have over 10,000 people following them on Twitter. Click on the followers that I highlighted with the red circle.
I am sure a lot are people that buy thriller books since they are following a Twitter account that blast out new thrillers. We click on their followers and find some people that look interesting.
While the tops ones are not exactly what we are looking for you can see a list of who follows eBookThrillers and go and find some readers to follow. As I am scrolling and looking I will also look for other authors in the genre and see if they have a big following and follow some of their followers in the same way I described above. Personally I do this as a daily task. I do about 50 – 100 a day and you could do more if you wish. I think Twitter allows you to follow about 2000 people a day based on the amount of people you are already following of course.
Sometimes you can look at the peoples list and find some good ones to follow. On the upper left hand side under favorites you will see List. Click on that and you may find some great places to find more readers. if you want to find readers that are local to you check out our Twitter for book signings page. It has some great information for finding local Twitter followers.
I personally don’t like the strategy of following people just so that they follow you back. I know it works for some people, but it just makes me feel dirty. I also try to never be following more people than I have followers myself; I think that makes me look desperate.
I follow people because I’m interested in what they have to say. If I cease to be interested in what they have to say, I unfollow them. And I never EVER follow people who’s last five consecutive tweets have been promotional “buy this book” type tweets. I expect others to follow or unfollow me for the same reasons.
Hi Graham
Thanks for the comment, I appreciate you taking the time to leave it. I am guessing you are not using Twitter to help you with book sales. That is fine, but this article is aimed at helping you find others that are reading in your genre. You don’t have to follow a million people to have it work. You can follow a couple of people a day that look interesting. I can appreciate you for not following more than are following you. I use to do that myself, now I couldn’t tell you how many followers or people I follow are. This is because I don’t use Twitter on the web, it is a horrible experience if you are. I use a service called Hootsuite and I have my followers broken down into a list. These list contain stuff like Family, authors, readers, etc. I don’t see everyones tweets that I am following. Besides the Twitter account for this site I also manage 24 others.
Hi, Vinny
On the contrary, I am using Twitter to sell books, and have sold a few to friends I’ve made on Twitter. My point was that I try to be as authentic as possible.
I may be an author, but I’m also a husband, Christian, computer programmer, gamer, and most of all a human being, and my tweets reflect all those things, not JUST my writing. 🙂
I also don’t use Twitter on the web. I don’t use Hootsuite either, because in general I dislike web apps in all shapes or forms. So it’s the TweetDeck desktop client for me! For scheduling, I use Buffer, which is the best I’ve found so far (pity they don’t have a native desktop client).
I tweet a fair bit about writing and reading, I blog once a week, and I tweet also about all those other facets of who I am as well. I VERY occasionally tweet a “Buy my book” type link, because as I mentioned, I know how irritated I get when people tweet nothing BUT those links.
Go look me up: @GrahamDowns. Maybe you’ll follow me, maybe you won’t, and that’s okay. 😉
Cheers
Graham
You can be authentic and follow people that might be reading in your genre. I am not saying go out and follow a million people. I am also not saying you have to tweet “Buy my book” all the time.
I think we actually agree, and have been talking in circles. 🙂
Just so long as you’re not following people with the express purpose of getting them to follow you back. You actually need to be interested in what they’re saying, and willing to enter into conversations with them.
I agree! My method is to be used as a way of meeting like-minded people. The amount you choose to follow and interact with is up to each person.
Well. That’s fascinating. What I’ve been doing is looking for authors in my genre (time travel adventure), and looking at the list of their followers, and following the ones that don’t say “author of” or “selling follower lists” or offering to do promotion for a fee. That’s worked a little.
I’ll have to see if I can find an account that promotes time travel fiction. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing any genre-specific accounts on the Who to Follow tool.
It is actually ok to follow some of the ones that are “Author of” because the people that write in genre also read in genre and buy books.