Authors Electric

I’ve been a writer for many years now, and during that time I have learnt a lot about social media—and seen a lot of hapless authors trying to sell their book on the back of it. The number one no-no is authors not using their name in social media (the name on the book they are promoting), and probably worse is building an entire author platform around a single title. What they do when they release another book? Make another website? Who’s got that amount of time? Your name (the name on your book) is the SINGLE most important thing when it comes to social media. JK Rowling couldn’t sell The Casual Vacancy until someone let slip that she wrote it, so what does that tell you? If you need it spelling out you’re in the wrong business! The next is on Twitter (my favourite waste of time) where authors overuse hashtags. Take for instance this: #animalbooks Stop ur #dog fouling in the house. #animallovers #nonfiction #dogs #animals #canines #booksonanimals Http://not.a.real.link.ama...

Katherine Roberts           Katherine Roberts and I started this blog in 2011, because although it’s a fine thing to be an indie-author, it’s quite another to be an indie-author who’s known to exist by anyone outside their own family.           Amazon stocks over 2 million books, and has a world-wide market.  You have to wave hard and jump up and down a lot to get noticed in a field that size.           So Kath suggested getting a group together, so we could all wave and jump at the same time.           What I didn’t foresee – though I should have  – is how quickly our bloggers would become a tight little community.           I should have foreseen it because both Kath and I are members of  the Scattered Authors’Society (SAS), where exa...