When you’re a new author, figuring out how to market your book effectively so you get book sales is tough. Just trying to navigate the book marketing jungle is enough to make some authors give up before they’ve started. But you don’t have to be one of those authors. You can instead be one of the authors in the know. One of your best tools for effective book marketing is Twitter. Twitter scares many new authors because they don’t know how to use it effectively to sell their books. Here are five tips to get you the new author started:

1. Don’t just use Twitter for advertising your book. This is a quick way to get followers to un-follow you. If you only send tweets when you have a new book out or when you’re trying to get people to buy it, you will lose people. Instead tweet about things that interest you. You could for example find out interesting facts about events in one of the towns where your characters live and then tweet about them with links. Or you could tweet about a job one of your characters has and tie it into your book.

2. Get involved in Twitter conversations. You can do this by searching on Twitter for subjects that interest you. The best way is to add a hash tag or look for popular topics associated with a particular hash tag and then get involved. #amwriting or #bookmarketing for example.

3. Use Tweetdeck or Socialoomph to schedule your tweets ahead of time. This saves you time and energy. Personally I prefer Tweetdeck because I can also respond to new followers, and follow them back!

4. Follow people whose tweets interest you. In order to get followers you have to follow others. Be judicious about who you follow, while it’s perfectly okay to follow other authors (after all they are readers too!) try and follow an equal amount of others who read such as reviewers for example.

5. Use your author’s name as your Twitter handle. Some authors use their book title or a variation of it, or some other handle that readers won’t recognize, and this can end up costing you in book sales if readers aren’t able to associate your Twitter account with you. Now there are exceptions, for example, my handle lalla gatta is now associated with my author’s name Laura Tolomei. But that’s because I worked hard to make sure it was so. I still strongly urge authors to use their name or pen name when they set up their Twitter account so readers can easily find them.


Twitter should be in the marketing arsenal of every new author, and I hope these tips will help you the new author to use Twitter to more effectively market your books!

And if you’re particularly efficient in the promoting, you might end up also with an audio book. It’s what happened to me. So here’s my first audio book ever:

Besides the marketing tips, what authors really need is a great book! I won’t go as far as saying my Halloween release is a great book, but I’m certainly very proud of myself and of how my first BDSM book turned out. For my readers and all those passing by, I include a sneak preview Unedited excerpt and blurb of Bondage Slave For Hire.

Enjoy.