Creating character/book related twitter accounts

[allmywires]

Has anyone done this? Does it make even a slight difference to your marketing/sales? I did think it was a good idea, hence I created them, and now I'm stumped as to what to do with them. (Obviously at the moment I don't have a publishing deal to market, but I'm the hopeful type).

 

[thaddeus6th]

Not specifically dedicated to a single character/book.

You could have musings from characters on real life events, or have them interact with one another (or similar accounts).

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I came across someone yesterday who referred me to their character's website. Personally, without a contract, i can't see how much you'd pick up from it.

 

[allmywires]

Hmm, see, that's the worry. And I'd have to become one of those militant tweeters following everybody and anybody in the hope of a follow back and #hashtagging #every #keyword...

 

[Mouse]

(Link to them so we can see...)

 

[allmywires]

I haven't written anything on them yet

 

[alchemist]

You do have one bit of publicity gold -- the large organisation who followed one of them. You need to keep them interested, so at least keep that account active. Maybe get him to tweet something interesting at the organisation (can't remember which character it was, but one of them was a fan of LFC). Maybe get the guys to follow some real-life people too, especially ones mentioned in the story.

Sure, the accounts won't really work unless you get published, but it won't need much time to keep them active. I'd say pick a time in the story when the two characters are busily engaged with each other, and throw a few tweets between them for this time -- a bit of football, a bit of innuendo. Also, maybe, make a couple of fake fans' accounts and tweet the lads.

 

[allmywires]

You are a wise one, sir. The main problem is the currently-unpublished conundrum: do I start now to build up a sort of back catalogue, or just wait?

 

[alchemist]

Your immediate goal is to snag an agent or publisher, so I say start now and prove you're innovative and willing to do the publicity thing.

If you get an agent and they say you should have done something different, you can set up new accounts and do it again.

 

[allmywires]

Mm, good point. Ta again for the wise words!

 

[allmywires]

OK, tweeting as a fake person = officially disconcerting. But I've gained 3 followers for each of them (excluding me) after only 2 or 3 tweets so it must be working...

 

[alchemist]

Already?!?!

Portentous!

 

[allmywires]

One would hope! Maybe there's a market out there for thinly-veiled homoerotic football chat.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

One of my characters used to keep a blog - it was quite popular but it was a challenge not to give the story away. I had just done it for my own amusement as I was writing the story and it only had a few followers so I was a bit surprised when I stopped keeping it or missed a week to get a pile of emails asking me were it was.

Not sure if it would have affected my sales or not.

 

[alchemist]

I see one of them picked up a spam porn follower already (I didn't click on it but it looked obvious). It seems to infest the football-related areas on Twitter.

Edit: good example, Anya. It's something I'll have to think about if my Rural Fantasy story ever gets finished.

 

[allmywires]

Yeah see Anya, as the story has a specific timeline that's now been pulled back about 4 years and is pretty current, I think it could work quite well in my case.

Yep, you can't avoid the spammers. I have a load of them on my account.(Following me, not the other way round, to clarify...)

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Stupid question, but how do you actually do it?

 

[allmywires]

As in create the twitter pages?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Yeah. Do you need multiple accounts or can you have them all under one account? If you need multple accounts does that mean you have a seperate home page for each one?

 

[allmywires]

Yeah, the labour-intensive (well, relatively...) part is creating the different accounts because you need a different email address for each one, and so I had to create 2 new email addresses as well as Twitter profiles. I have to log out/log in on the Twitter web page but on my Blackberry app I can have multiple accounts so that's easier to switch. It's a bit of a faff but you can get things like TweetDeck that help you manage multiple things, though I'm yet to figure out how you actually tweet from them...