Twitter: a profound waste of time for marketing

[Ihe]

I read/heard somewhere that word of mouth is what spreads books success. So I agree with building up a good fanbase. Make them passionate about you and your book and they will spread your gospel like the spanish inquisition.

I'd read somewhere that The Pillars of the Earth was barely marketed (or not at all) when it came out, and it blew up in central Europe solely through word of mouth. The thing with word of mouth is that at first it can be a slow way of raking up the sales, but the growth is of an exponential nature. When a book "explodes" and suddenly becomes a best-seller out of nowhere, I wager it is more often than not because of word of mouth.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Nobody would expect the Spanish Inquisition.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I had a nasty experience on Twitter last week. I'm involved with running an event in Belfast for a series of reading events, in conjunction with International women's day, to raise the profile of the women's writing scene in NI. So far, so uncontroversial.

Anyhow, it's entirely unfunded and being ran by volunteeers, and someone (a songwriter) contacted the organiser through the hashtag on twitter to ask for a space. It wasn't followed up by a DM or anything on the official site and got missed by the organiser, who fell on her sword and offered a place at either the Limavady or Belfast day (I had a drop out.) So far, so okay.

Anyone, someone who was a friend of the songwriter called the organiser out for not responding to the original tweet, and accused the event of excluding songwriters (which it isn't. In fact, there are a couple at the events.)

A couple of days later, he remade contact to say his tweets were now the ones at the top of the hashtag, did she want them removed (he never did remove them, as far as I know.) Anyhow, we saw this exchange and the event attendees tweeted about it (as they have been all along) and the hashtag was restored to being about the events. Hurrah!

At this point, I decided to unfollow the person in question, as I really didn't want to get involved.

An hour or so later, he put up three fake blue plaques (you know, the type that tells you someone lived here). One had the organiser's road and town on it, one mine, and one a poet's, who is merely reading at an event and has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the organising.

Apparently such behaviour is called Doxing. He did this on three women, just before bedtime (despite his thread being full of supporting-women-type posts.) As he lives less than 4 miles from one of the addresses, you can imagine how unsettling it was. (I was furious, which doesn't aid sleep. Not fun the next day when running around with two kiddies. And then I had to explain it to my kids because they're at the age where if things are discussed, they want to know what it's all about, and reassure them that no, this man that didn't like the event mum was organising wouldn't come to our house.)

Twitter's response? It's not a problem. It's okay to do this.

So, there you go.

 

[Toby Frost]

What a delightful person. Sorry to hear that that happened.

 

[thaddeus6th]

That's disgraceful, and Twitter's response is feeble.

Unfortunately, there are some damned fools around.

 

[Brian G Turner]

An hour or so later, he put up three fake blue plaques

Have you contacted the songwriter to point out how this reflects on him?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Have you contacted the songwriter to point out how this reflects on him?

Ha! It was Benny Hill...

It was annoying, but it made me more mad than anxious.