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If you’re marketing your books online, then you’ve probably heard of Twitter. It was all the rage last year in social media, and millions of people have joined this micro-blogging community. Maybe you even started a profile page and sent out a tweet or two. If so, that’s great. And if you’ve been avoiding it for one reason or another, it might be time to try it out.

Why? With millions of people tweeting every day, it’s a huge source of potential readers for your book. It’s easy to get followers and it’s a great way to interact with your reading audience. But one of the main excuses I hear about why people aren’t on Twitter-or they aren’t using it fully-is that it’s so time consuming. Well, it can be. But not if you try the following tips.

Automate Your Tweets
With so many people on Twitter, you need a lot of tweets per day to really maximize your exposure. But you don’t want to spend all day tweeting. Automation is the answer. You can use the following tools to tweet on your behalf.

Hoot Suite: This program allows you to schedule tweets ahead of time. So once a month, you can go into your Hoot Suite account and set it up to tweet several times a day for you. You have to enter each tweet and schedule them one at a time, which can be tedious, but it’s worth getting several days of tweets out of the way at one time. I use this tool especially when I’m announcing a teleseminar or other event that’s scheduled on my calendar.

Social Oomph: This tool also allows you to schedule tweets for later, but the true beauty of Social Oomph is that you can set it to send all your new followers a welcome message. This saves time contacting everyone who follows you, and allows you to start building a relationship with them right away.

Twitter Feed: This tool allows you to link your blog or any other RSS feed to your Twitter account. This means any time you update your blog, a tweet is automatically sent out. You only have to set this up once, and then it works automatically. And it’s a great way to get new eyes on your blog posts.

Make Tweeting Easy
You can only automate so much of your Twitter activity. You’ll also have to check in periodically through the day to communicate with people and send out the more personal tweets, like what you’re working on that day or what you’re excited about. The key to getting it down to ten minutes or less is making it super easy to tweet. Here are a few tips.

Link Your Twitter Account to Your Cell Phone: When your cell phone is linked to your Twitter account, you can take advantage of spare minutes in your day, like when you’re waiting in line or stuck in traffic, to post updates. When you sign up for a Twitter account, you’ll be asked if you want to use your phone with it. And they’ll give you the steps for setting everything up. [blog owner's note: see www.twittwer2go.com]

Use a Desktop Twitter Manager, Like Tweet Deck: Tweet Deck is a free program that you can download to your computer and use to see everything that’s happening on Twitter in one place. It has a column for the live feed, a column that shows everyone who’s mentioned you, and a column for all the direct messages you receive. This makes the all-important social interaction easy.

Send Quality Tweets
If you want people to respond to you and follow you, then you need to keep them interested. Plus quality tweets will maximize the time you do spend on this social media site. I’ve heard a few different formulas from different Twitter experts, but basically you want a daily mix of tweets that include:

Giving away good information that will interest people in your target audience, such as links to your blog posts, tips, interesting quotes, links to other people’s blog posts, links to articles, etc. This should be the bulk of your Twitter activity-and these are the easiest types of tweets to automate, by the way.

Being nice to people by complimenting them, retweeting their tweets, engaging in conversation, responding to their questions, etc. This is what you do when you check in with your mentions and direct messages.

Being real. Social media is all about being approachable. So once or twice a day, check in with what you’re working on, what’s bugging you, what delicious restaurant you ate lunch at, something funny you found on the web, or what’s going on in your life. Let your followers know the real you, even if you don’t think it’s interesting.

Asking for a sale. The whole point of your Twitter participation is selling books, right? Well, then, at some point you need to ask folks to buy your book. However, you can’t blatantly promote your book all the time (maybe once or twice a day if you have ten-fifteen other tweets going out), and you can’t just come right out and ask people to buy. Try tweeting about some tip from your book and link to a sales page, making it informational as well as subtly promotional.

Tweeting Your Way to Book Sales
Twitter is too big to ignore-especially if you’re marketing your book online. It’s a great, free way to get traffic to your site and find a reading audience. But no one wants to spend all day tweeting. When you use these tips for automating, simplifying, and maximizing your Twitter time, you can reap all the benefits from this using this social media site in ten minutes a day or less!

Melinda Copp helps aspiring self-help, business, and nonfiction authors write and publish books that establish expertise, attract clients and opportunities, and share their message in a compelling way. Visit http://www.writerssherpaprograms.com/writeabook.html for a free copy of her Write Your Book Quick-Start Mini E-course.

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Traditional Book Publishers have a lot to offer the right author. Most authors spend a great deal of time in the book stores and are thus exposed to the stars of that platform.

Traditional Book Publishers are, in fact, the gatekeepers to becoming a star of the bookstore show.

Most people think the norm is getting a landmark deal, cashing an obscene advance check, and kicking back while the book sales stats make history. When they think of reality they accept that they may have to do a few guest appearances, book signings, and speaking engagements; reluctantly. Now, back to reality. In reality, traditional book publishers don’t really have much to offer the beginning author.

I’m going to share with you some pros and cons of this form of publishing.

Cons of traditional book publishers:

Takes years to find a publisher. Do you realize that most authors spend anywhere between one and two years just trying to get accepted by a publisher? You may think you will shorten that time by having an agent but if you don’t have a strong platform already, you’re not likely to be accepted by an agent. You better have rhinoceros skin because you’re going most likely deal with years of rejection before you get a publishing deal; if you get one.

NO, No, no, nO…. Get used to hearing this word is as many different forms as they come because it cannot be overstated how pointless this process is for a beginning author with little national celebrity already established.

Little return. If you do actually get published after a year and a half of begging and another year and a half producing the book, you will most likely get between $1,000-$5,000 as an advance. After that, if you don’t work your tail off to make your book sale for the publisher, that’s going to be the end of your career as an author; $5,000 for years of work. That’s all she wrote!

You still have to market. This is probably the basic issue with the entire setup. You may think that a traditional publisher is going to market and promote your book for you and make you a star. The truth is they will push your book for about 2-3 months, and not the kind of push you would expect, and if your book doesn’t catch on strong, you’re fired.

That’s why you have to already have a pre-established platform upon which to draw for sales. That means it’s up to you. Look at Dr. Phil. He became a star with Oprah before he put his first book out. That’s why it is doing well; not because he’s a great author, but because he had created a platform upon which to draw for sales. The book publishers didn’t make him successful, he made him successful.

You lose control of your work. The publishing company takes control of your book cover, design, layout, and makes final editorial decisions. Meaning if they don’t like some of your content or your writing style, they can make you change. Your heart and vision becomes their vision for you. Besides that, you don’t own the rights to the book, the book publisher does.

Pros of traditional book publishers:

Publisher fronts the money. They will cover the cost of producing your manuscript and printing it. They will cover the cost of marketing to the bookstores. They will pay you some amount of advance money. If you’re highly demanded, this could be hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Less workload than self publishing. You don’t have to manage every aspect of your career as closely as you do as a self publisher; unless you just hire a marketing company or publicist.

Stroke your ego. You get to say that you landed a traditional book publishing deal, which does have prestige in certain circles. You may not be making any money or be selling any books but it’s prestigious to some folks.

DISTRIBUTION Power. The biggest and most important benefit (business wise) of getting a traditional book publishing deal is that they have the best distribution available to getting your book on the shelves.

How to win a major publishing deal

You have to ask yourself why so many people are becoming self-published authors. Its because for far too long, people have clamored around traditional book publishers as the gatekeepers to their success as authors. If you want to truly succeed as an author you have to be business-minded. You are the manager of your own writing career, whether you want to accept it or not.

Traditional book publishers have a lot to offer the right authors, I said that at the beginning. Then I went on to tell you all these negative things that killed your hope momentarily. I want to completely rebuild that hope and set you on the right track, right here. If you want to make it BIG and reach thousands or millions of people with your book you have to take this approach and think long-term:

Self publish a book as inexpensively as possible while maximizing the book’s quality. Don’t self publish a cheap looking book because you certainly won’t get taken seriously. We at GMA publish high quality books that can easily sit on the shelf next to best-selling traditionally published books. That’s important.

Learn how to sell your book. This is easier said than done, right? You need to immerse yourself into getting educated on the many alternative venues through which books are promoted and sold. Only 20% of book sales come through bookstores. So where’s the rest of those sales being made. Look at our book marketing webpage to find out more about where these sales are being made.

Build a business. You will unquestionably build a book selling empire by building a strong platform. Dave Ramsey is a best selling author on living a debt free lifestyle. His book became a best-seller and will remain a strong seller because he’s a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and conference speaker.

I told you earlier about Dr. Phil, he has his own show now; he’s going to continue to write best-sellers because of his platform. You may not build the career that Dr. Phil or Dave Ramsey has but you can certainly build a strong enough platform and sell thousands of copies of your self-published book. Once you have strong sales and a strong platform, you can walk outside and a swarm of traditional book publishers will be rioting for your business.

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