Ain't no corned beef #hash

Hi fogeys you will see below our post on Hashtags. For those out there who do not know what they are the article will be a treat. As we are writers however we decided to have a go at trending two hashtags to bring readers and authors together #teamwriter and #teamreader. Once you know what a hashtag is, you will realise that it is a powerful way to connect people. To use a hashtag you simply search the tag and it should in theory help you to connect people together by finding people also using the tag. So for example you might see #teamfollowback #teamblueeyes #teamprettygirls etc etc. You get the general idea. The idea is the # allows you to tag eachother and grow the # thus connecting people together who are interested in connecting. So if anyone is interested let us see if we can grow #teamwriter and #teamreader so we can find more like us. Remember the whole idea is to connect on a genuine front. sure we are promoting work etc but we also love the human interaction and connection and first and formost that is what it is all about. We just cant get enough of twitter. Declan and Belle also love to hear from people all over the world so happy to hear from you. In particular #shoutout to #SouthLondoners is that another possible tag. Who knew? Just so you know it works,at least 10 new people follow us per day and that is over 100 per week and that is a low average without us doing anything at all. So more when we are connecting with tweeters. We would also like to thank Toby Neal who wrote the book Building an Author Platform that can launch Anything, who is an inspiration and who has piloted some wonderful ideas of how to use twitter. Dont forget our books can be bought from the icons at the side of this post if you would like to check out our work.

Twittermenot?

Ran another ostensibly successful campaign on twitter selling around 200 Hoxton Kirby's on a free download. Unfortunately did not pip the charts so visibility probably not enhanced. That'll teach me I probably should have run the campaign for 2 - 3 days to pip,into the charts. This may be a useful lesson for those of us trying to push tricky genre. (ie vampire whodunnit) In order to get this level of download which is three times as great as I have ever had on this novel, I routinely tweeted the hashtags #freebie #free #giveaway and also ensured I got listed in book promotion sites. On this occasion ebookdealsukhttps://www.facebook.com/EbookDealoftheDayUK who tweeted me and also I tweeted their site referencing my book and obviously facebooked them and gave them general exposure to other social networks. Watch this space I will tell you whether this converts into sales. Hoxton Kirby Vampire Investigators can by purchased for 99c/p on the icon to the side of you. Belle Marsh. Our KDP experience with Nightingale Vale below enhanced out sales this month and popped us back from a recent slide.

@EQUALMAN this guy seems to know a thing or two.

SOCIALNOMICS BY ERIK QUALMAN THIS VIDEO SAYS EVERYTHING WE WOULD WANT TO SAY BUT ARE NOT CLEVER ENOUGH. WAKE UP TO THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IT IS HERE TO STAY. WE WISH WE WERE THIS GUY. So if you're trying to say something or promote something and it isn't getting out there, think about it!

Just before you check out our twitter tips check our Freebie 14th June, Belle Marsh's vampire whodunnnit. Click on icon to the side to go to Amazon. Take a look. Now read on. Thanks.

HASH NOT THE ILLEGAL KIND THE TAG KIND

OK the big trendy issue on Twitter is hashtags what are they? A hash tag is any word prefixed with the hash key #, so for example #twitter.

It is used to enable the user to locate words of interest via the search facility or simply because it flags up to other interested users. As an author there are some essential tags you will want to know about.

My list of useful tages are #thriller
#mystery
#romance
#promo
#free #kindle
#amazon
#ebooks
#followFriday
#FF
#followback
#freebie
#giveaway #goodreads
#thrillerthursday
#summerreads
#wordmongering

These are highly general. Experiment with what works for you and don't be afraid to invent your own they may catch on.

One way to see if a tag is popular is to plug it into the search facility and see how many references come up.

One good tip is to watch trending hashtags and see if they link to your interests, then use them. 

There is a sort of form of use, namely not to overuse hashtags in one post, frankly though I would say that currently hashtags are definitely a way to increase reach and currently I probably overuse them a bit.

Moreover, specilist hashtags can link you to a TRIBE and therefore put you in touch with people who may be interested in re tweeting you so, for example. I belong to World Literary Cafe and Writers unite and we have hashtags that flag us to other members, so forexample with @Writers_Unite I may hashtag #wupromo which tells other members I am promoting and they will likely retweetmme.

It is up to you to research your own helpful hashtags as they are highly individual.

Now I am not teaching my grandmother to suck eggs when I say that old mantra in order to get the most out of Twitter you need committed and many followers 1,000 minimum to even begin to make any impact. So if hashtags are not working for you it is probably because you have a. no followers, b. followers who are not interacting, c. are following far more people than you are followed by.

For example, one twitterer was following 400 peeps but only had about 50 followers that is entirely the wrong way round. Ideally you need your followers and following to be about even or even more ideally loads following you and far less that you are following.

So keep at it fogies and remember we are always here to help.

Our books can be bought on the icons at the side with the big hand or marked Hoxton Kirby. @DeclanMunro and Belle Marsh.

International Twit who knew?

Just to give some of our fogies the heads up on how to get an idea of your international reach. YOU MAY BE SURPRISED. We simply did a Google search of our names Declan Munro and Belle Marsh. We went through a deep search up to about 30 on the searches at the bottom of the Google page. Now we discovered a lot of entries that were,unexpexted such as that we are listed on Google Japan, or Barnes Nobel and a variety of other more obscure book shops etc in Sweden, Germany and other places. Now we utilised the web addresses to tweet this information. so, for example, we have readily and easily tweeted a ready translated Japenese link to Amazon Japan for our Japenese followers and potential followers. We also found blog posts on other peoples blogs that we were unaware of. As you will know if you go on a blog you can tweet from the post, we selected a few and tweeted those as well, of course making sure to acknowledge the blogger with a thanks or re tweet. Upshot we have widened our reach and capitilised on exposure that we did not even know we had. a great tweet. have a great weekend whereever you may be. SAYONARA IF you like what we write why not join our blog or if you fancy reading one of our books we can be reqched by clicking on the icon with the big hand and the other Hoxton Kirby Icon @DeclanMunro and Belle Marsh More on hashtags soon.

Tweeting and greeting

Yesterday we quadrupled the amount for free books we have ever moved under a KDP select promo on HOXTON KIRBY. Why? Well below we speak about how to use twitter during a free sale. With Hoxton Kirby we have always found the demographic difficult, it is a mystery, it has vampires and it is also a romance, so what changed? We have been running book promos for about 7 months, Nightingale Vale has always had shed loads of downloads but Hoxton has been more difficult, but we think we are onto something. We said before that 1,000 followers is like a magic number, it makes you a more visible player in the world of twitter we think. Suddenly you are visible and now we get an average of 20 unsolicited followers per day, which is great. Most importantly we are getting re-tweeted much more often and sometimes by people who we did not know had ever heard of us. The net result was that on average we were tweeted to about six thousand potential customers by friendly re-tweets, much more than some paid ads. We also cleaned out twitter with TWITCLEANER so that spam bots and those who do not want to follow us were at a minimum.(see below). Most importantly people are beginning to trust us and know we are real people who are genuinely interested in them as much as they are interested in us. Converting free sales into actual sales is a tough call but we are extremely impressed with twitter as a medium for meeting and speaking to people who may be interested in Declan Munro and Belle Marsh as both authors and people. We,also use other methods such as selective free ads and hashtags to widen our reach more of which later. don't forget we are just like you, ordinary dudes who have learned all this in a mere 7 months before which we were complete social network illiterates. If we can do it so can you. Keep well fogies. If you are interested in any of our books click on the side icons the one with the big hand or Hoxton Kirby on it.

MY KDP TWITTER EXPERIENCE FOR AUTHORS

OK, so our recent tweet was about enhancing your twitter grouping or TRIBE. However, I digress today. I was asked by an author friend how to place tweets to enhance my free sales on KDP. 

Firstly I owe a lot to http://www.karenbaney.com/archives/1519 who seems to have found a formula for free sales. But how to put it in to practice?

You need to have built a large twitter platform, say over 1,000 followers and well thought out and genuine twitter followers too. This means you must be genuine, because if you are genuine and do friends favours, they will reciprocate and also post your book to their followers cumulating your reach.

During a free sale you need to post your tweets at well choosen times of the day that match the Amazon time zones so that globally your tweets will be seen. I post about 5 times throughout the day from Amazon UK and US and Amazon de but frankly that is because I have global friends which I would encourage. Now you need to post so you are not ridiculously spammy but enough so you are seen. In short, that is it. I will go into the finer details throughout my posts.

Have a great day and successful twitter time.

CHECK OUT TOBY NEAL'S BUILDING AN AUTHOR PLATFORM THAT WILL LAUNCH ANYTHING which is a very fine analysis of methods used by that particular author and much of which I have found useful in my own twitter excursions.

My final result on my KDP free sale was 467 and that is after our book has been out for 7 months and has had a number of free sales. It is not our best download ever but compared to last month it is a big improvement.

More importantly it is not about downloads but about visibility. We hit 82 in US thrillers and mysteries, 77 in UK thrillers and No 2 in German psych suspense. This made us very visible in the top 100's which is where you must aim to get.

We will soon do a post on hashtags.

DECLAN MUNRO'S book is now 99c/p and can be purchased on the icon to the side with the big hand. BELLE MARSH's book similarly priced is on the icon marked Hoxton Kirby. Also check out Shardpubs.blogspot.com.

Just a little link before you read on. My book Nightingale Vale is free,3 and 4 June. just click on the side icon with the big hand if you're interested. I am on Twitter @DeclanMunro

BIRD BATHS

We spoke last time about the value of twitter to authors especially new authors seeking to introduce themselves. we spoke about authenticity and that engagement is now a bottom up activity. No longer are we to be told what to enjoy or purchase by top down advertisers, the buyer now has the power and the seller has to work hard to get noticed. However there is a certain amount of pragmatism in using twitter, unfortunately not everyone on twitter is active, not everyone is a sharer and a lot of people use remote bots to publish without interaction. RSS feeds and automatic updating software have an essential place in using twitter but nothing compensates for real honest interaction.

So how do you sus out who is a sharer and who is just a bot. The essential aim is to have some balance between followers and those you are following so ideally you want more followers than those you are following. The way to do this is to regularly spring clean your twitter. There are many ways to do this, we use TWITTERCLEANER which identifies inactive or ghost tweeters that are simply clogging up your twitter and not participating in the shared world of tweeters. Then there is TWITTERKARMA this identifies which tweeters are actively following you and those which have no interest in you. Both allow you to click on the offending tweeters and unfollow.

It seems harsh but regular cleaning gradually whittles down your groupings to a TRIBE of people who have a shared interest in following you and you them and who are more likely to start to develop mutually successful relationships whether it be hobbies or sales leading to a more exciting and interesting twitter experience. CHECK IT.

TAKE CARE DECLAN MUNRO AND BELLE MARSH.

DON'T FORGET WE ARE AUTHORS OURSELVES AND IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN OUR WORK CLICK ON THE ICONS AT THE SIDE TO CHECK US OUT AT AMAZON