Tag Archives: Twitter

A Picture Says a Thousand Words: The 13 Kinds of Authors You Meet on Twitter

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A decent picture, except I look uncharacteristically pissed off.

Okay, fellow indie writers:  I hope you’re ready to laugh at yourselves.  For this entry, I wanted to turn my attention back to everyone’s favorite social media platform…(drumroll)…Twitter.  But before I get into my observations, I want to take a few moments to be self-deprecating, because I feel like it’s one of my better qualities.  Sometimes for the sake of commentary, I like to assume this sarcastic narcissist persona, even though that’s pretty far from the way I am in real life.  It’s kind of a role I play, but I apologize for it from time to time because I’m always legitimately afraid that I might rub someone the wrong way, but I don’t want that to happen.  You all are nice enough to stop by and read my articles, so the last thing I want to do is offend anyone.  If you aren’t laughing, then I’ve done something wrong.

That said, today I want to critique the sorts of profile shots that we authors like to use on Twitter.  I’m not saying that all authors on Twitter use terrible mugshots and I’m certainly not saying that mine is any better than anyone else’s.  What I will say, though, is that a few “aspiring authors” on Twitter are astoundingly lazy or, sadly, insecure with the pictures they choose.  Therefore, I am going to suggest that, if you are on Twitter, perhaps you should use this article to judge for yourself whether you might need to perhaps change your Twitter persona.  Even that tiny picture can tell people a lot, and I can’t help but feel that some of my fellow indie writers are not doing themselves any favors with the Twitter pictures they have chosen to represent themselves.

If writing is what you wish to do, you need to exude professionalism at all times.  Lord knows this can be next to impossible, but you still need to do your best.  You want to look your best and you want to be memorable, without making a mockery of yourself.  It’s okay to be funny in your pic, but you don’t want to be viewed as a joke.  It’s okay to look serious in your pic, but I would avoid looking to self-serious.  It’s hard to pass off the glowering, self-serious author pose if you have 57 followers and you’ve never been published.

Be yourself!  Don’t be afraid of what anyone thinks!  Have the confidence to own your author persona.  No one is expecting you to look like Ryan Gosling and if you do look like Ryan Gosling, why the HELL are you wasting your time writing books?!

Anyway, here are the 13 kinds of authors I routinely see on Twitter.

1.  The Black & White Mugshot Author – This is a step in the right direction when it comes to professionalism, except it’s so overdone.  I’m not saying that a black & white mugshot is taboo.  These are fine shots!  All I’m saying is don’t be afraid to show a little color!  This isn’t the 50s.

2.  The Kitten with a Lime on Its Head Author – I didn’t even become aware of this meme until I got on Twitter, but let me tell you right now:  If you have this picture as your author photo on Twitter, REMOVE IT IMMEDIATELY.  You’re associating yourself with a flippant gag.  I must have 100 followers who are using this as their profile pics and it just screams “amateur”.  Please make this meme end!

3.  The “I’m an Important Author and I’m on a Phone in My Picture” Author – Admittedly, this is a fairly rare form of author, but it always makes me laugh.  Who are you talking to??  Am I supposed to believe you’re on the phone with your agent?  I always assume you’re on the phone with Ted Nugent.  I don’t know why you’d be on the phone with Ted Nugent and, frankly, I don’t want to know, but there it is.  You’re talking to Ted Nugent.  Put the phone down and pretend like you have time to take a decent mugshot.

4.  The 30-Year-Old Glamour Shot Author – My heart goes out to these people.  Most of the time I get the feeling that these sorts of pictures are intended as a substitute for physical appearances that, ahem, may have declined over the years.  At 26 years old, it’s pretty easy for me to point the finger at older ladies & gentlemen who perhaps don’t have my luxury of being able to jog for an hour a day because I don’t have, I don’t know…children?  But there’s nothing wrong with being older!  Unless that 1970s glamshot is simply INCREDIBLE, go ahead and take a more recent picture.  You have NOTHING to prove to people on Twitter and I promise that you have nothing to prove to people like me.

“Son…Somewhere in ‘at egg’s an author waitin’ a hatch.”

5.  The No Picture Whatsoever Author – Please, please, please have at least SOMETHING as your profile picture.  On the one hand, most people who don’t even have a picture generally don’t stick to Twitter very long in the first place.  On the other hand, those who do make me wonder just how ugly they are.  I mean, if you don’t have ANY kind of picture, I’m forced to assume you look like Sloth from “The Goonies”.  If you DO look like Sloth from the Goonies, you still shouldn’t be ashamed.  Buy a nice Armani suit and OWN it.  Also, you may adopt the term “Slauthor”, which I came up with just now.  You’re welcome.

6.  The Hilarious Non-Sequitur Author – Authors tend not to do this as much as those annoying “#Followback” teenagers.  Usually, a hilarious non-sequitur photo is just that:  A funny .GIF or .JPEG that is completely unrelated to the Tweeter.  These pictures might be worth a chuckle, but I almost never follow them because I assume they aren’t real people.

7.  The Inanimate Object Author – An author who followed me this morning has a picture of a hot air balloon.  Now, perhaps he or she is IN the hot air balloon.  I don’t know.  I believe I’ve also been followed by a woman who used a picture of a toaster as her profile picture.  Maybe she’s a Cylon from “Battlestar Galactica”, but something tells me she isn’t actually a toaster.

Of course, if you’re an author like me, I’ll understand that the shadowy picture is not so much the result of pretentiousness as having not been able to pay the electric bill.

8.  The Shadowy, Mysterious Sci-Fi Author – These are my favorite pictures on Twitter and the ones that most lend themselves to that “self-seriousness” I was talking about earlier.  In my opinion, just because you’ve written a 55,000-word, unpublished sci-fi novel does not instantly give you the right to take a mugshot where half of your face is concealed in shadow and you’ve clearly used Photoshop to make one of your eyes red or teal or fuschia or something.  Only two men on Earth are allowed to take photos while standing in that much shadow:  Stephen King and Chris Carter, the creator of “The X-Files”.

9.  The Just a F***ing Lunatic Author – Sometimes you just know a person is not so much an author as an undiagnosed, soon-to-be-incarcerated mental patient.

10.  The Author Made of a Mass of Books – These authors are almost as lazy as the people using the “Lime Cat” memes.  You know who I’m talking about—folks whose pictures are nothing but a stack of books?  You aren’t given any sort of added legitimacy by being represented by a stack of books you may have read but almost certainly didn’t write.  It would be like me walking into a dentist’s office and seeing a gigantic pile of bloody, misshapen teeth on the secretary’s desk and deciding, based on that, “THIS GUY MUST BE A GREAT DENTIST!”

11.  The World Traveler Author – I’ve been guilty of this one.  “Wow!  That guy’s standing in front of The Parthenon!  I can’t wait to buy his dystopian sci-fi novel on Amazon!” said absolutely no one ever.

12.  The Suspiciously Handsome/Attractive Author – Have you ever been in this situation?  “Say, that aspiring YA author looks a lot like Anne Hathaway.  (follows) Come to think of it, she looks almost EXACTLY like Anne Hathaway.  Wait…Yep, that’s definitely a photo of Anne Hathaway.  Here it is on Google when you type ‘Anne Hathaway’. (unfollow)”  Yeah, nothing irks me more than trying to pass yourself off as Anne Hathaway.

I know this picture is a lot to live up to, Folks. Just do your best ;)

13.  The Genuine Author – On the flip side, nothing makes me smile more than seeing someone’s genuine grin in a well-framed, well-lit profile pic.  You’re an aspiring author!  You’re doing something you love!  For crying out loud, be HAPPY about it!  I love seeing young people, middle-aged people, elderly people, skinny people, husky people, poor people, rich people, bald people, fuzzy people, etc. SMILING about putting themselves out there and becoming a part of this bustling indie writer market that is exploding on the Internet.  For me, these are the pictures that make me feel invested in the new world we’re creating.  Be indie, support indie, and be proud!

How much tweeting is TOO much tweeting?

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This is going to be kind of a scatterbrained post today.  I’m literally scribbling this in stream of consciousness because I’ve been drowning in query letter drafting and editing and new writing.  It’s a good sea in which to drown for sure, but the quality of my blog posts is bound to take a few blows.  It doesn’t help that I’m also trying to watch the Euro Cup while I do all of this multi-tasking.

Anyway, if you’re an aspiring indie author and you aren’t using Twitter, you are doing yourself a monumental disservice.  If you’re willing to invest the time, Twitter is a fantastic way to make contacts with other writers, build a community of loyal readers, and market yourself to a potentially infinite network.  Obviously Twitter has its downsides—rampant spam, obnoxious tweeters, asinine political agendas…sometimes all three at once—but you can’t deny that Twitter is a crucial platform, at least until the next big social media giant renders it obsolete.

Twitter seems born for writers.  After all, we already have volumes worth of stuff to say.  We’re often witty and thoughtful and we’re used to working with word limits.  But how much tweeting is TOO much tweeting?  I started a Twitter account back in January and I’ve had about six months now to survey the Twitterverse landscape and I can say with absolute confidence that some people are getting it right and some people are getting it very, very wrong.

The obvious temptation is to download a bot like TweetAdder and just let that app do all the heavy lifting.  I’ll admit, I paid the $50 and downloaded it myself and it has been invaluable in accruing my follower base.  However, I’ve never been content to just let loose the reins and have a robot do all my Twitter marketing.  There is nothing more obnoxious that someone who basically inundates your Twitter feed with “buy my book!  buy my book!  buy my book!” tweets every thirty seconds.  Accordingly, I do run promotions on my Twitter feed but I try to space them out throughout the day.  I promote my books and I promote my website articles, but I try not to overwhelm people, because one a person has purchased your book, you shouldn’t keep harassing that person to keep buying it.

I try to balance out all of my promotional posts with as many witty Tweets as I can.  Maybe I’m dropping some sort of cheesy pun or a joke, commenting on a movie I saw, or a song I heard.  The point is to make myself accessible to people and by “people” I’m not just talking about writers and readers.  I want to try to attract whomever I can to my page because those are the sorts of people I want to buy my books.  “Twitter readers” are great to have, but chances are they’re so inundated with other books that I wonder how in the world they’re ever going to get around to reading mine.  Ditto for writers.  I appreciate their support but I know that my book will not be high on the totem pole when they download it.  I want to attract people specifically to my writing in hopes that they’ll make room for it, if that makes any sense.

In general, twenty self-promotion advertisements a day spaced out over about nine or ten hours seems like a fair number.  In truth, I’ve probably doubled this before, though.  The point is to not make yourself obnoxious.  I’m always apologetic and grateful whenever I can be.  It’s always a small honor every time someone chooses to follow me.  I always try to follow back other writers, too, just to return the favor.  It costs me nothing to follow one more person but the reciprocity potentially earns me back hundreds of followers.  That’s how I’ve skyrocketed from 1,000 followers back in March or April to 10,000 followers as of yesterday.  I’m currently averaging about 300-400 followers every day.  While I realize 40% of those (I’d say that’s a realistic estimate) are spambots, I’m still beating the odds of most writers who have 70-80% spam followers.

Seriously, spam followers are worthless.  They only talk about themselves and they never buy books.  They also rarely have anything helpful to say.

Since I’m not really sure that this entry has had anything particularly helpful to say either, I wanted to direct you all to a few very helpful indie writers who message useful stuff on their Twitter feeds and who seem to do a good job of following back.  Follow these authors and check out their blogs, because I’ve found quite a few of their posts to be extremely helpful:

- Mike Wells (@mikewellsauthor)

- Melissa Foster (@Melissa_Foster)

- John Locke (@DonovanCreed)

- Andy Holloman (@AndyHolloman)

- Debbie Ohi (@inkyelbows)

Sorry that wasn’t one of my more coherent posts.  I’m not even sure I answered the question that titled this post.  I keep glancing up to see if Russia is going to score another goal in this game.  It’s amazing I could even string two words together.  I keep pounding my fist on the keyboard every time a shot goes wide ,kmjk…just like that.  Good luck on the writing this week, Guys.  I’m going to post another excerpt from “Naked in Korea” as soon as I can.  Check that out under the “Books” tab of my menu.  Thanks!