ReTweet THIS!

Another blog post, so quickly? OMG PERISH THE THOUGHT!

This is a different aspect of what's going on in my publishing world, though, so bear with me.

Retweeting is a great tool for indie authors to get the word out. It is! It's awesome! I will not lie here; I've absolutely used it, and only rarely retweeted back. There's a couple reasons for this, which might portray me as being greedy or selfish, but whatever.

1. I've only a handful of followers... who follow all the same people I pretty much do already, with a couple of exceptions. Most of my followers are other authors who already tweet their own work, often to the same circles I tweet to. Any more tweets, and it's just ... more chaos to the flow.
2. I generally only tweet a book once or twice, then call it good. I don't spam. I don't enjoy spam, so I don't do it. I DID spam for a couple of days to see where the sweet spot would be for advertising so I COULD tweet a book once and call it good, and then just promptly tweeted whenever a book was out, no matter what time of day it was. I'm not exactly a good self-promoter. And I apologized profusely for all those tweets, cause I felt bad spamming. 
3. I'm not on Twitter a lot. I check it once a day, if I remember. 
4. The sheer amount of stuff that goes across my Twitter feed is incredible. Like... really incredible. There's simply no way I COULD retweet all of that unless I set up an auto-reTweeter, which I won't do. Even for the "duplicate" Tweets I have, I type them all out cause ... I'm not sure why, but I do.
5. If I'm going to promote something, it's going to be something I've read and really fucking enjoyed. Promoting someone else's work is like putting your seal of approval on it, especially since it's coming from a person rather than a reTweet ring or something automated. I have so few reTweets because there's nothing I feel I can personally put a stamp of approval on... except for like... two. Two books I think. On Google plus I'm more than happy to share because that's an environment where repeat posts don't mean a whole lot but shares mean a fuckton, but on Twitter, it just gets lost in the spam. I would rather my word mean something than nothing. 

Don't give a shit if people call me selfish or whatever. That's not the point. If I had thousands of followers? Yeah, I'd probably be on Twitter more. I have... 33. I think. I'd probably be Tweeting a lot more. I'd probably be aces at self-promotion. I'm not though. I'm really, really not. I've set up a little corner, and I'm fine with it. I'm not a full time writer. This is a hobby, a side job, for me. My livelihood is not dependent on the money I bring in writing. I write other, non-erotica, things. I spend time with my husband and my friends. 

I really appreciate any reTweets I get, believe me I do, and I want to help out how I can... but again, most of the stuff that passes through my feed is already reTweeted to my same followers, or originated with them. I simply do not spend that much time online. Which is weird, now that I think on it, but I don't. That time I DO spend online is generally spent writing, because I write my stories in Google docs so I can go back and forth between work and home (when I get a free moment at work, that is) without wondering where I was. When I'm not writing, I'm researching about writing, or about what I'm writing about. 

If I became a full time writer? You bet I'd be more about the self-promotion and getting into groups and stuff! I would be all over that stuff! Sad truth is that I'm not, because it's a side thing for me. Writing is a side thing for a lot of authors, and they just don't have the time or resources to be all over it, nor have the money to hire a company or a publicist to do it for them. C'est la vie. Such is life.