You know it’s about
the quality not the weight, but when you are writing a new book you just have
to keep checking the word-count in that little box at the bottom of the screen.
Once it starts to approach the 80,000 mark, you know you have made on huge step
towards getting published. My book, Thai Lottery… and Other Stories from
Pattaya, Thailand (www.thai-lottery.net)
is around the 103,000 word mark which equates to well over 400,000 characters.
How on earth, can an author express any idea worth listening to, in 160
characters or less? I was scornful, dismissive and certain that Twitter was for
the shallow and the inarticulate. I could see why professional footballers
might use it. I doubted that most would have the concentration span for
anything longer. I would not even look at Twitter let alone start using it
myself.
Then my publisher said
the words I dreaded hearing more than any other. “If you want to get this book
moving, you have to get on social media. You have to get yourself a Twitter
account.” It ranked with the day the
doctor pulled on a rubber glove and said, “You are over 40 now, you really
should have the examination.”
I did as I was told
and started to experiment. Trying to work out why a bloke who had not posted a
single tweet still had six followers, looking at some of the successful
twitterers to see what was so interesting. I put up a few references to my
book, that got me a few followers. I found a few members who shared my
interests and all of a sudden I was up and running. Then I saw a few things
that were genuinely funny and entertaining. I found out about #hashtags and
trending and how to find people I might be really interested in. They often led
me to web-sites that were definitely worth a look. I was seriously hooked.
There is a vast amount of garbage out there, people who tweet and retweet those
terrible sayings that your grandmother used to deliver, “turn that frown upside
down” and similar trite garbage, but there are plenty of gems too. And they are
not that hard to find.
The “following” thing
can seem like a pointless popularity contest sometimes. People say they will
follow you if you follow them back, they have nothing interesting to say and
you can be certain they will never look at what you tweet. But its so tempting,
it gets you one more follower and what the hell? Someone good might look at you
and decide you must be interesting because you have lots of followers. So you
swallow your pride and click “follow”.
Two days ago I would
have described myself as an avid van of Twitter, a complete convert. Then it
happened. My book is about the Thai bar scene. There is one book about the
subject against which every other is judged. It’s called Private Dancer,
written by Stephen Leather, who has 29,000 followers on Twitter. I sent him a
message saying that I loved his books and that his web-site had genuinely
helped me to get published. I mentioned that I had written a book myself and
told him the name of it. He retweeted my message within the day.
If someone had told me
a few weeks ago that I could approach an author I really liked and tell him he
had helped me get published and he would respond by passing the information to
29,000 people who like his work too, I would have not have believed it was
possible.
Then I discovered
Twitter.
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