Reluctant bride of Twitter falls in love

I joined Twitter in June, 2009. Naturally, husband was the first person I followed.

When I began blogging in 2011, I automatically tweeted my blog posts (thank you, WordPress) because that’s what authors do, the way girls used to get married whether or not they really understood why.

Between the time I joined and about a month ago, I visited Twitter only a handful of times. I never tweeted and I had about ten followers. Twitter overwhelmed me with its seeming chaos. #WhatIsaHashtagAnyway? Looking at random tweets made my head hurt. So much noise—how could I find anything relevant among the cacophony?

Then, this past March, I read a post by the ever-helpful Joel Friedlander called “A Google Toolbox for Authors,” which led me to (re)discover Twitter’s power.

Alert, alert

Regarding Google alerts, Friedlander said, “If you play around with this tool I guarantee you’ll find some neat and useful ways to use it.” I decided to experiment. I had already set up alerts for my name and book title. Now I created an alert for “literary fiction.” This turned out to be particularly helpful. In the years since publishing “Dance of Souls,” I have often felt that readers and writers of literary fiction must be lurking somewhere on the Web, but I never seemed to be able to find them.

Now Google began sending me six to ten links every day to new material about literary fiction. Some of the links were dubious, but many were interesting and relevant, for example:

• “Women’s Fiction, Men’s Fiction, What Does it Mean?” (Huffington Post)
• Cat Lumb’s genre experiment on Twitter
• i09’s call for a new literary movement

At last, I had a way to discover things in a manageable, bite-sized way. Instead of a search yielding thousands of results, I had an e-mail with a few links I could quickly review, once a day.

Then came my next brainstorm. What if I were to share the items I found most interesting with my Twitter followers? And what if I were to start following, on Twitter, some of the organizations that are creating these interesting items? Suddenly, I had a path through the chaos, a method to curate, and a reason to pass on information.

Tweet, tweet

I tweeted. I followed. Twitter suggested more people for me to follow based on the people I had just followed. Sometimes the people I was following tweeted interesting things, which I retweeted. Suddenly, I began receiving several notifications a day in my in-box informing me that “So-and-so is now following you on Twitter!”

I have nearly reached the milestone of 100 followers. I realize this is quite underwhelming, but to someone who, mere months ago, avoided Twitter because it gave her a headache, this seems like an accomplishment. In fact, I’ve grown to enjoy the process so much that I’ve now had to do what so many other authors have advised: dedicate a particular time of day to social media, lest it swallow up all the time I could otherwise have used for writing and editing. (J.D. Moyer has some reflections on this.) Evening works well for me because by then my brain is too addled to focus on long prose anyway. Reading articles and tweeting is about what I can handle.

Brick by brick

So, I’m actually building my “author platform.” It will be a long haul to get from where I am now to where I need to be to successfully market my writing. But now that I’ve started, it seems a less daunting task. Best of all, I’m no longer anxious about Twitter. I’m excited to “meet” new authors and potential readers. Besides, I’d better have multiple social media platforms, because Facebook is getting more challenging every day.

What’s your relationship with Twitter? A virgin? Just-married? Divorced? Longtime partner? Do you use Twitter to discover new authors and books or to share ones you’ve discovered? I’d love to hear! Respond below or send a Tweet to @audreykalman!