You are here:
Sean's Writing Blog
Can you tweet your way to a bestseller?
30 June 2010
Justin Halpern has shown that it is possible to tweet your way to a bestseller. He created the Twitter feed www.twitter.com/shitmydadsays to share the wit and wisdom of his 74-year old father.
Twitter seems to be the ideal medium for expressing his Dad's knack of getting right to the heart of a subject. His latest advice is: "Don’t focus on the one guy who hates you. You don’t go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit."
Since the feed was established last August, Halpern has attracted 1,441,919 followers who subscribe to his tweets. That's a pretty impressive audience, and it's helped to make Halpern's book inspired by the Twitter feed into a bestseller. There is now talk of William Shatner starring in a TV show inspired by the Twitter feed.
There are two key lessons from this experience for writers everywhere. The first is that if you build a large audience for your work, it's a lot easier to get a book deal. This same advice is what has been driving bands to build up their live and online following for years: if you can show there is an audience for your work, others will be willing to invest in it.
The second lesson is that Twitter can be a valuable tool for refining characters. Halpern's feed is based on a real person, but there's no reason why you couldn't create a Twitter feed for fictional characters in your book and use the brevity of the medium to refine the characters' ideas and sayings so that they really shine. If people take an interest in what your characters have to say, they will be more willing to read about them in books. Of course, this does mean you need to have something compelling for your characters to say outside the context of dialogue, which is a whole new creative challenge.
If you want to get started with Twitter, don't forget to follow me! There's a chapter on how to use Twitter in my book 'Social Networking for the Older and Wiser'.
Labels: social networking, writing
Dip into the blog archive
June 2005 | July 2005 | August 2005 | September 2005 | October 2005 | November 2005 | December 2005 | January 2006 | February 2006 | March 2006 | April 2006 | May 2006 | June 2006 | July 2006 | August 2006 | September 2006 | October 2006 | November 2006 | December 2006 | January 2007 | February 2007 | March 2007 | April 2007 | May 2007 | June 2007 | July 2007 | August 2007 | September 2007 | October 2007 | November 2007 | December 2007 | January 2008 | February 2008 | March 2008 | April 2008 | May 2008 | June 2008 | July 2008 | August 2008 | September 2008 | October 2008 | November 2008 | December 2008 | January 2009 | February 2009 | March 2009 | April 2009 | May 2009 | June 2009 | July 2009 | August 2009 | September 2009 | October 2009 | November 2009 | December 2009 | January 2010 | February 2010 | March 2010 | April 2010 | May 2010 | June 2010 | August 2010 | September 2010 | October 2010 | November 2010 | December 2010 | March 2011 | April 2011 | May 2011 | June 2011 | July 2011 | August 2011 | September 2011 | October 2011 | November 2011 | December 2011 | January 2012 | February 2012 | Top of this page |
