Checking Book Promoters

Once you've published your book or ebook it won't take long before you start getting offers to promote your book. But how do you discover if a promotion is real or a scam?

Here's what you may face:

1. You receive an email offering to promote your book to 150,000 people on Twitter/X. The email is from someone with a gmail address and points you at a website full of promotion offers and glowing author reviews. It looks fantastic and the price seems quite reasonable. They offer tweets every day for a month, a listing on their website, and your book promoted in a newsletter sent to 50,000 people.
2. You are invited to enter your book in a literary competition with winners being invited to a conference at which the overall winner will be selected. The overall winner will receive a publishing contract.
3. You are offered a writing course which will teach you how to become a best selling author.
4. You are told Twitter/X  and Facebook are effective marketing platforms but only if you have thousands of followers. You can however, buy followers for a small fee.  
5. You are directed to a website on which you can place free copies of your books. You pay a membership fee for access. You can read other free ebooks on the site and agree to write positive reviews for them. In exchange other authors will review your books.

Here's what can be wrong with these offers

1. Email offers: a. Be very cautious of any offer coming from someone with a free email account.     The chances are these people are being paid an affiliate fee to persuade you to pay for promotion. If you do pay, you may well find you get the same affiliate account offer from the website owner.
     b. Look for which Twitter/X accounts the website will use and check how many followers they have. Are these followers genuine people? There are sites available e.g. Twitter Audit which will allow you to check followers. There is no point tweeting about your book to fake followers or people who have not been on Twitter/X for years. Beware of any sites which promise to tweet your book to thousands of followers but fail to tell you which Twitter/X accounts they will use. I was recently invited to use a book promotion site (which I won't name). I checked them out. They feature recommendations from authors who are selling about one book a month, Claim 208,000 Twitter/X followers but only identify one account with 79,000 followers of which 27% are real.
2. Competitions: Does the 'competition' ask for an entry fee? Have you ever heard of the literary 'award'? If not, try looking it up using a search engine and adding the word 'scam'. Does it offer that 'Finalists' in the competition will be invited to a conference at a hotel where the final decision will be made. In the fine print you'll probably find you must travel there at your own expense and pay for accommodation. 
3. Courses: You'll find many courses available on how you can become a 'best seller'. But what does 'best seller' actually mean? If you are a #1 best seller in the genre 'romance' then this is a significant achievement. You'll probably have a 'best selling in Kindle' rank of #1 also and be selling 10,500 ebooks a day. But if you are a #1 best seller in 'Engineering & transportation in Arabic' then you'll have a 'Best selling in Kindle' rank of something like 2,800,000 and be very lucky to sell one book a month.
   Q. Where do you find the 'Best selling in Kindle (or books)' rank?
   A. On any book or ebook page scroll down to the 'details' section and you'll find it there directly above the 'Best selling in [genre]' ranks.
   Q. How do I get an estimate of sales from the 'Best selling in Kindle/books' rank?
   A. There's a very useful page on Internet which will work this out for you. Find it at TCK Publishing. Enter the sales rank without the # or commas.
   Note - not all courses offered are useless.
4. Buying followers: On Twitter/X this is a waste of money. The followers will be fakes and will disappear when Twitter/X gets round to checking them. Trying to sell followers on Twitter/X is against their rules, so is buying them! You may lose your account.
5. Reviews: Buying or trading reviews is against Amazon's terms and conditions. If Amazon discover this your Amazon account and books will be deleted.  

Which promotion sites do you recommend?

There is a clear leader for effective book promotion websites, https://bookbub.com Unfortunately it is very expensive to promote there, prices range from about $150 to $1,000 depending on genre, and not all promotions are accepted. Unless you manage the promotion very badly, you will make back more than the cost of the promotion.

Less expensive but still effective promotion websites are:

•  FreeBooksy - Great for free ebook giveaways.
• Fussy Librarian
• Robin Reads
• E-Reader News Today (ENT) 
• Book Barbarian - great for science fiction
• Red Feather Romance - great for, you guessed it, romance. 

If Twitter/X is so effective why do I need 10,000 followers and how do I get them?

Twitter – a snapshot in time

Whenever you go to Twitter you’ll see a snapshot of recent tweets. As the number of people you follow grows that snapshot becomes a tiny window through which you look at a huge panorama. When you are following a thousand Tweeps there will be new posts every few seconds. You will not see the vast majority of the tweets people you follow post. Neither will your followers see most of your tweets unless you put their twitter username in the post. My friend Aaron Hatman - @aaronhatman probably won’t see a post like this: ‘New topless Rhianna picture! pic.twitter.com/bAZLbuKL (pic)’ (For those of you who are shocked – it’s not quite what you think). Aaron would see it if it was posted as ‘@aaronhatman - New topless Rhianna picture! pic.twitter.com/bAZLbuKL (pic)’. Even if Aaron is not using Twitter when the post is made he will see it when he clicks ‘@ Connect’ on the Twitter toolbar Not only will Aaron see the post but it will also appear on the Twitter feed of anyone who follows Aaron and that’s useful! (Dirty Twitter trick coming up) If you want all your followers to see the tweet start it with '.@'.

Twitter Spamming

Some Twitter users set out to build a huge Twitter following by following everyone they come across, waiting a few days and un-following all those who have not followed them back. If they run out of follow rights then they make space by un-following even those who have followed back. These people just want followers – they are not interested in taking part in conversations. Once they have built up thousands of followers they will usually start posting nothing but adverts – Twitter spamming. If you identify such a person is now following you. Don’t follow them back – respond to their following message with a message such as ‘Thanks for the follow @selfishtweep. Check out my pyramid #technothriller Stones,Stars & Solutions http://amzn.to/16osMxN’ Not only will this appear on their feed but it will also appear on the feeds of all those who have been silly enough to follow @selfishtweep.

Making your tweets work for you

An average Tweep won’t spend long on Twitter each day so the chances of them seeing your post are small but there are several things you can do to increase the odds.

1. Tweet more often. Professional marketers make posts up to six times an hour 24/7. Of course that’s quite impossible to do if you also want to write books, sleep, eat and enjoy life. The answer is to use an automatic tweeting service such as Buffer to tweet on your behalf. Until recently I used a Java application  to tweet from a bank of 5,400 tweets I collected over the years. That no longer works due to changes at Twitter/X. Now I use a service called Bulk Buffer to add 95 pre-prepared tweets at a time from my Twitter post collection to Buffer. 
2. Use hashtags to make your tweets more discoverable. I used the hashtag #technothriller in my post above. Hashtags are keywords used by groups of Tweeps. They can be normal words or a collection of symbols. Try to use two hashtags. That gets you 21% more attention. Using more than three has the opposite effect. If you must use three then put two together and the third as far away from them as possible. Don’t start your tweet with a hashtag.
3. Try to keep your tweets to less than 120 characters. That was the original Twitter character limit. Shorter tweets draw more attention. For most Twitter users the limit is now 280 characters. For verified Twitter/X users (who pay a subscription each month to get a blue tick) the limit is 500 characters but only 280 of those will be visible unless the reader clicks to read the full tweet.
4. The most effective tweets contain a video. The next most effective contain an image.
5. Humour sells. Here's an example
   
6. Re-tweet the posts of other authors. They often respond by re-tweeting your posts. There are Twitter groups which you can join which do this. Find them on Facebook or at Goodreads. One such group is ASMSG – Author’s Social Media Support Group (http://on.fb.me/18KucG0)
7. We are told Twitter works best at the weekend. I’ve found that to be true. Most marketers restrict their tweets to certain times of the day in their area, but if you are an author, writing in English, your market is worldwide so you should tweet throughout all 24 hours.
   
   One thing you should notice on this map, although the US has a minority of English speakers, it has by far the greatest number of readers. This means you should carefully consider the use of US spelling. Should it be 'colour' or 'color'? In my own experience I find US readers will judge 'colour' as a mis-spelling but the rest of the world is perfectly happy to ignore 'color'.

So how do I get ten thousand plus followers on Twitter /X?

It will take time, about half an hour per day for months. Twitter will only let you follow 2,000 people at first. When people start to follow you that limit will slowly increase.

It will help if you know what NOT to do on Twitter/X yourself and which 'Tweeps' you shouldn't follow.

Don't Make These Mistakes

1. Do you have a profile picture other than this default or an egg?    ...

6. Is your profile written in good English? … No? Sorry spelling and grammar are still important and if you make too many mistakes, I'm unlikely to follow you.

7. Do you send out lots of direct messages? … Yes? Then I'm already following you but I won't be for much longer. The occasional one in a private conversation is OK. DMs can be an intrusion though - especially the pointless ones which say  just "Hi". If you send me a link that I haven't asked for then I'm NOT going to click it.

8. Are you trying to be offensive? ... Yes? Then there's no chance. No one likes trolls.

9. Do you post sexually explicit pictures? ... Then you've no chance and will be blocked by me and are likely to blocked by Twitter soon.

10. Are your tweets and profile full of text abbreviations? ... Ys? b4 I fllw U id hv 2 b crzy

11. Do lots of your tweets have links with red WOT circles? ... Yes? Then there's little chance. If you don't know about Web of Trust - WOT - you should do.

12. Does your profile mention your religion? ... Yes? Then there's little chance. Go preach somewhere else. Telling me you are Christian/Muslim/Jewish/etc tells me only that faith (belief based on no evidence) is acceptable to you. You're wrong - Faith is the cause of the world's greatest evils.
13. Does your profile mention your politics? ... Yes? Then there's little chance and you might not want me to follow you either because I enjoy poking fun at politicians. Here's a blog post about the 2010 UK election.

14. Do you sometimes retweet others?  ... No? Then there's not much chance unless you are really interesting

15. Do you respond to others tweets? ...No? Twitter is all about interaction so I probably won't follow you.

16. Do you have more than 1,000 followers but have tweeted less than 100 times? ... Yes? I don't follow celebrities with nothing to say or people who have bought or gained useless followers.

17. Do you ONLY retweet others? ... Yes? Then there's not much chance (unless you are retweeting me). Many Twitter spammers do that. Try at least pinning one of your posts so that it shows at the top for me to retweet in return.

18. Do you retweet the same 20 tweets endlessly? ... Yes? Then there's no chance. Try retweeting from a bank of 1,000+ tweets.

19. Do you use TrueTwit? ... Yes? Then there's no chance of me 'validating.' If you want to find out why - check here.

20. Do you allow auto-tweets about how many people unfollowed/followed you or to thank people for following?  ... Yes? Then that's not good but there's some chance if something else catches my interest. Rather than thanking people - retweet one of their tweets.

21. Do you tweet or retweet multi line posts like this:
Yes? These are so annoying, especially if you are using Twitter mobile apps. I'm not going to follow anyone who hogs so much space on my screen!
22. Are all your tweets adverts for something? ... Yes? Then there's no chance and I'll probably mute your tweets.

23. Are all your tweets quotes? ... Yes?  Then there's not much chance unless you find really interesting quotes I've never heard before.

24. Do most of your tweets start with ' I ' ... Yes? Then there's not much chance unless you are really interesting. That's called being a bore.

25. Are most of your tweets about sport? ... Yes?  Then there's little chance. If you do that expect to cut your followers by at least 50%

26. Are you promoting/tweeting about Apple products? ... Yes? 50% of people are not at all interested and a good percentage of those think Apple users have more money than sense. Because of the latter people who want to sell you things will probably follow you.

27. Are your tweets protected? ... Yes? Then there's no chance. I'm not going to follow anyone I can't see.

28. Are you pretending to be Yoda, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes, Einstein etc... Yes? I'm tired of these so there's little chance - do something original.

29. Are most of your tweets auto-messages 'Thank you for following me...'? Yes? Then I doubt if you'll be sending one to me. Here's Rachel Thompson's blog about why you shouldn't allow auto-tweet messages

Even worse - someone who retweets 'Thank you for following me' tweets.

30. How many hashtags are you using? 1-3? That helps (2 is best) 5 or more - You must be kidding! Is the key stuck? ###################### How many hashtags are in your Bio?

31. Do you follow tweeps and unfollow them 1-2 days later? … Yes? By the time I get round to checking your tweets, you'll probably have unfollowed me and I probably won't follow you because I doubt if you're real.

32. Are you really a 'bestselling author? I'll check, and if your books have an overall rank at Amazon.com of over a million, I'll probably laugh, feel smug, and move on Beware the (desperate) bestseller.

33. Is your profile picture one showing an attractive young female? I'll check you out carefully (No, not that way) to find if you are fake. This profile picture (which I've partially pixelated) proved to be one used by several tweeps all of which had 30-40% fake followers. This may be a little unfair to genuinely attractive young women but you'll have to live with it. To check a profile picture in Google Chrome right click it while holding down the 'S' key.

34. Does your bio have a comment "Follow me and I'll follow back" or use the hashtag #Followback? Whilst I might tolerate you following me, I'm unlikely to follow you back and I'll probably hide posts with your twitter name. You will accumulate hundreds of fake followers with that statement. Spend some time and check those you follow.

35. DO YOU TWEET IN ALL CAPS? This is considered shouting and bad manners on Internet. You'll find the Caps Lock key at the left hand side of your keyboard. Switch it off and I may follow you. Incidentally block capitals are harder to read because they lose the shape of the word. Try enlarging the text if you can't read it at normal size (Ctrl scroll wheel or Ctrl + usually works)

36. Is your Twitter bio a quote or comment? This tells me nothing about you and doesn't give me a reason to follow you. →

I might make an exception for something extremely clever or witty like this: ↓

At least that tells me you have a sense of humor but a bio like this tells me nothing about you other than you watch TV ↓

37. Is your bio a declaration like this? ↓

Just imagine if it said the opposite and said "My opinions are not my own. Retweet signifies agreement and support." Can you have an opinion if it's not you own? Would you retweet something you do not agree with and don't support? Bios like this say nothing useful.

38. Are you an 'Award winning author'? Unless that 'award' is a Pulitzer prize, Booker prize or a Hugo award, I'm not likely to be impressed. Award Profiteers: How writers can recognise and avoid them

39. Does your Twitter bio start with 'We'? I want to socialize with individuals not corporations and organizations.

40. Does your bio mention your podcast or that you are a 'speaker'? I don't have time to listen to you, especially if your podcast contains that famous phrase 'Without further ado' (which invariably lies,) I can read much faster than you can speak.

41. Does your Twitter bio mention your sexuality? That's none of my business and I simply don't care to know more. As to those posts mentioning 'He/him' or 'She/Her' what is the point of this? Are you the boy called Sue?

42. Have you told me about yourself? If your Twitter bio is simply about your product or service, then I'm not going to follow you and probably won't be interested in your product/service.

43. Is your Twitter full of currently trending hashtags such as #BLM #ANTIFA #Resistance ?
Whilst I might sympathize/agree, filling your bio with them tells me of causes you support but isn't telling me much about you. ALL lives matter,  EVERY political organization has some redeeming features and resisting is fine if you can propose a BETTER alternative.

44. Does your Twitter bio look something like this?

I'm not going to waste my time trying to figure out what this means and as a result won't be following you.

45. Is your Twitter bio simply a hyperlink with no other information? If you are too lazy to tell us about yourself then I and others are too lazy to follow you and are probably too cautious to click unexplained links anyway.

46. Your Twitter biography is no place for a copyright statement. Tell people what you can do for them - not what they can't do.