Twit Wit

So, I talked to John Green and Neil Gaiman yesterday.

Well, okay, I didn’t talk talk to them. And if you asked either one of them in person who I was, odds are they wouldn’t be able to tell you. But I interacted with them. And that? COOL.

This is the glory of Twitter. Faster than email, easier than blogging, simpler than Facebook. It’s the ultimate in quick, pithy comments—and those 140 characters also happen to be a remarkable tool for networking. (And fun. Because you know I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t fun. If I did things just for my own good, I’d be exercising and doing math and stuff. Nope. I’m all about the fun.)

A quick rundown of the basics for those of you still resisting:

You set up an account.

You post 140 (and ONLY 140) character “updates.” (But updates is a very loose term—for example, one of my tweets [that’s twitter-speak for an update] this week was, “I’d like to peel away my soul, run it through a gentle wash cycle, and hang it in a warm, breezy patch of sun. I wouldn’t mind wrinkles.” Not exactly an answer to Twitter’s question of “What’s happening?”, but then again, few of my tweets ever are.)

You “follow” people, and then their tweets show up on your home page.

You reply to or direct tweets at or simply mention other people by using their Twitter handle with the @ symbol. So, if you wanted to respond to my tweet, you could say, “@kierstenwhite What the crap kind of tweet was that? Clearly you have no idea how laundry works.” So if I were following you (which, with tweets like that, I probably wouldn’t be—really, rude) that would show up on my home page, but even if I weren’t following you, I could check my replies and see every tweet where someone mentioned my name.

Wow. So. There you go. That is How Twitter Works. But Why Twitter Works is even more interesting. Because as you put yourself out there, you know what happens? You make connections. There are a very great many people that I’ve gotten to know and connected with on Twitter that I never, ever would have otherwise. I simply wouldn’t have known how to find them, or even to try and look in the first place. Take Andrea Cremer, fellow debut author. Sure, we were linked through the Tenners group, but if it hadn’t been for interacting on Twitter we never would have discovered our mutual appreciation for all things Buffy. Andrea’s turned into a crit partner, a fabulous book find, and a friend.

I’m not going to give you a laundry list of authors I wouldn’t know otherwise, but Twitter has also afforded me several other opportunities I wouldn’t have had—not the least of which is my essay in the upcoming Vampire Diaries anthology. The editor found me—you guessed it—on Twitter, as I was tweeting with a few other young adult authors whom she had already asked.

Now, Twitter can also be a good marketing tool. I find out things I wouldn’t have realized otherwise (like yesterday was the release day for RADIANT SHADOWS by Melissa Marr—it had slipped my mind until I saw it there). However—and this is a big however—a twitter feed, if used for nothing more than self-promotion, is ragingly, humongously, embarrassingly boring. (Quit telling me humongously isn’t a word, spell check. It’s a word if I want it to be a word.) No one wants tweet after tweet linking to your new blog post, or tweet after tweet linking to reviews of your book, or tweet after tweet linking to your hair-extensions-for-horses business.

I don’t want people to follow me on Twitter because they want to hear about PARANORMALCY. I want them to follow me on Twitter because they absolutely adore me and simply can’t get enough of me. Or, rather, because they like me and maybe sometimes I make them smile. Or at least because they think I’m kind of dumb but I have shiny hair. Whatever. So I have some rules. I don’t link to anything of mine, be it blog post or contest or whatever, more than twice a day, if that. Usually I keep it at one. I don’t talk only about my writing—in fact, I don’t talk about it much at all. I try not to tweet bomb my followers by posting tweet after tweet after tweet so I fill up their entire screen (although if you follow my friends too you may see our conversations, and I apologize for how funny we think we are) (but really, we’re kind of funny) (okay, mostly we’re crazy).

In short, I try to make my twitter feed something someone would enjoy reading. Because if they enjoy reading it, then they won’t mind if I gently remind them to GO OUT AND BUY MY BOOK RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW on September 21^st. And a huge bonus to having a presence on Twitter is that you can ask me questions or tell me things and I see them immediately, and it’s much easier to respond than to reply to lengthy emails. It’s a pretty awesome way to interact; you’d be surprised at how many of your favorite authors have made themselves available there. I don’t know about you, but when one of my author idols replies to me, it still makes me all giddy inside. (I guess there are famous people on there and stuff, too, but my eyeballs bleed when I try to read their tweets, so I generally stick to the authorly types.)

And figuring out how to be clever in 140 characters? Come on, you know I can’t resist. So go play on Twitter, or don’t. But there it is—another networking tool, way to interact with people you like, and, most of all, supreme procrastinatory outlet. Now if they could just get Bejeweled Blitz on Twitter, I’d never need to get any work done ever again!