Twitter: Who Do You Follow? Why?

What I'm reading: The Bargain Bride, by Marbara Metzger (bike) Saving Fish From Drowning, by Amy Tan (book club)

Promo alert – there are only a few days left to get Deadly Secrets for your Kindle or Nook (or apps thereof) for 99 cents.Also, my contest for a USPS Flat Rate Box of Books ends Jan 6th. Details here

Although I never thought I'd be a Twitter person (Tweeter?) I've found the platform to be a fun place to visit. Working in relative isolation, it's like the office break room, where you can exchange quick bits of information, pictures, and other updates. Do people care what you eat for breakfast? Probably not. But they might care about your weather (I've got one follower from Florida who's extremely jealous of the climate up here. Others are glad they don't live where I do.) People ask and answer questions. Also, quite frankly, it's a way for me to know what my kids are up to!

After the holiday weekend, I noticed I had a rather large (for me, anyway) number of new followers. I thought I'd share what makes me follow someone, or follow them back.

First, unless it's clearly a spammer, I'll never block someone who wants to follow me. There's no limit (as far as I know) as to how many followers I can have, so why kick them out? I also don't "unfollow" people who don't follow me back. To me, it's not a game of reciprocity. If someone finds my Tweets interesting, why not let them have access to them? If they unfollow me because I don't automatically follow them back, that's their right, and if that's the way they're using Twitter, that's fine. I think it's a kind of snobbery, but that's just my opinion, and they're free to have their own.

Here's how it works for me. I get an email that says Jane Doe is now following me on Twitter, and there's a link to her profile. I'll click over to that and look at:

What's Coooking Wednesday? Almond Torte

What I'm reading: Breaking Silence, by Linda Castillo

Thanks to DeAnna for yesterday's post. Thought provoking and informative.

After Monday's post about marketing, I thought I'd follow up with a bit more discussion.

There are all sorts of opinions on what works where. Do people care if you tweet (or Google+ or Facebook--not sure what the right verbs are for those) about the mundane? Although most say they don't care, for some reason, I get the most feedback to my Facebook posts when I share pictures of food. I posted a picture of the cake I made for our community picnic last weekend, and had a LOT more action over there than when I talk about writing.

So -- why not share it here? And if people are interested, maybe I'll continue this "What's Cooking Wednesday" as a regular feature. And I'd love some reader guests -- my Tuesdays aren't restricted to writers, although that seems to be where they come from. But the topic isn't restricted to writing. Travel and hobbies are also popular topics.

OK -- here's this week's recipe: Almond Torte.

This Social Networking Thing - Twitter 2

Continuing yesterday's post on things I've learned about Twitter. (Again, this is purely ONE person's observations; what I get out if it might not be the same for you.)

Following someone means you'll see their tweets. However, if follower A is chatting with Follower B, and they 'reply' to one another, unless you're following both, you'll only see one side of the conversation. There's a little icon in TweetDeck that will let you see what follower A is responding to, if you're really intrigued.

What I don't understand is the people who tweet, "I've just unfollowed everyone who isn't following me." Or "If you don't follow back, I won't follow you." I don't get that. Do I really care who follows me? Unlike Facebook, which has a ceiling for friends, Twitter doesn't. My take: anyone who wants to follow me can follow me. If you require I reciprocate, well…then don't follow me. You won't hurt my feelings.

Pet peeve: people I follow who spend most of their time in what should be private conversations between the same 2 or 3 people. I have a separate list for these; they're worth keeping because they also provide good content.

This Social Networking Thing - Twitter

Thanks, Joselyn. I didn't accumulate many bridesmaid dresses, but I never wore them again. When I got married, since I had only 1 attendant, I let her 'recycle' any of the dresses she'd already paid for. Couldn't see making her pay for another one, since she didn't have to coordinate with anyone else. As for reusing--both my daughters wore my wedding dress, with minor modifications.

And, to continue my Social Networking impressions. Today it's Twitter – and tomorrow as well, because this got too long. Kind of ironic considering Twitter is designed for short! I'm much more of a Twitter newbie than I am on Facebook, although I consider myself a novice at both places.

I recall meeting an aspiring writer at a conference, telling me how fantastic Twitter was. He'd accumulated 17,000 followers, he said, and he'd tweet, and they'd retweet, until he was sure tens of thousands of people were hanging on his every word. He was convinced that each and every one of these followers was anxiously awaiting the publications of his book, so that if he did sell, he had a huge audience ready to buy.

resisted Twitter a lot longer than Facebook. I'd observed people seemingly obsessed with reporting their every move, and frankly, I found it a head-scratcher. Who could possibly care if I was going grocery shopping, or if I had oatmeal for breakfast.

But, when I found my kids, and even the Hubster, had set up Twitter accounts, I figured I'd give it a try.

It's Not About Reciprocity

What I'm reading: Death Watch, by John Sandford

Thanks, Susan for your thought-provoking post yesterday, and good luck with writing the book. I hope you do.

We had our first non-family guests the other day—a colleague of both mine and my husband's from my marine mammal conference days, his wife and his mother. They were interested in my writing and asked if they could buy a book, and if I'd autograph it. (No brainer, eh?). But what one said when I signed their books surprised me. She said she probably wouldn't get around to reading it, but she thought it was special to have a book signed by someone she knew.

(Reality intervenes here—while I'd like her to read the book, and like it enough to recommend it to others and maybe even buy another one, I took her money without hesitating.)

One thing I learned was that although writers are very supportive of each other, you can't expect reciprocity. When I first joined my local RWA chapter, authors would show off their new releases, and I'd gladly buy them, regardless of sub-genre, because these were my immediate writing colleagues. It didn't really matter that I probably wouldn't have picked up their books if I didn't know them personally.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

I promised another look at an aspect of social networking. People love it, hate it, and everything in between. To tweet or not to tweet? How useful is Twitter for writers? Today’s guest, cozy mystery author Elizabeth Spann Craig, weighs in. I'm anticipating some lively conversation in the comment thread.


It used to be that I could say “sign up for Twitter only if you want to.” I wasn’t really getting a whole lot out of it, but was dutifully tweeting several times a day.

I think now I’ve got to give Twitter a big thumbs-up. Used correctly, Twitter can be an incredible tool for networking, driving traffic to your blog, and connecting with the greater writing community.

The key is finding the writing community on Twitter. I’m including book bloggers, avid readers, as well as industry professionals in the term ‘writing community.’ Think of Twitter as a huge university and your writing buddies as your fraternity or sorority that gives you a smaller group to communicate with—instead of trying to tweet to a random group of people.

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Don’t be surprised by the learning curve on Twitter. It took me a week before I felt comfortable using it. There are many easy tutorials on YouTube to help you learn the basics. This one is good: http://tinyurl.com/b4b78p.


Get started by going to your favorite writing blogs and finding the blogger’s Twitter address. Start off by following these bloggers. Then you’ll see who they are following. Click through the community of people who they follow. Follow some of those people.

Twitter lists is just starting out. Basically, if there’s a writer you like, and they’re using Twitter lists, you can follow their entire list. In their sidebar will be labeled lists. My list is called “Great Follows for Writers.” You click on the list and Twitter asks if you’d like to follow the list.

You can use 3rd party applications like TweetDeck to organize the people you follow. You could have your favorite tweeters in one column, family or friends in another column, and local businesses in yet another one. I mainly follow book industry people, but I do also follow local weathermen, news organizations, and local businesses that tweet coupons.

What do I get from Twitter?

•Excellent links to writing articles
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•An opportunity to learn more about writers I follow
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•A chance to share my article discoveries with other writers.
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•An opportunity to promote my own blog and blogs I’m interested in.
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•Industry-related news in real-time.
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Disadvantages

•As with all social media, it’s easy to spend too much time using it.
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•It’s time-consuming to set up a list of good people to follow.
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•It’s one more distraction from writing.
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Some recommendations for usage:

•Set a timer.
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•Use Twitter three times a day, sparingly, after getting it set up.
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With a little time and effort, Twitter can be a great tool for writers to network, obtain industry information, and promote their work.

Elizabeth Spann Craig writes cozy mysteries for Midnight Ink (The Myrtle Clover series) and Berkley Prime Crime (The Memphis Barbeque Mysteries). Her latest release, Pretty is as Pretty Dies is available in bookstores now. You can enjoy Elizabeth's enlightening posts at her blog, Mystery Writing is Murder.

Monday Fun

What I'm reading: Monkeewrench, by P.J. Tracy; Dare to Return, by Tracy Cooper-Posey

I've mailed my edits to my editor. We'll see what she thinks. I took a day off from working on my current manuscript to unwind as well as to regroup and pick up with the other plot and characters. I admire anyone who can work on two projects at once. I find I have to immerse myself in a single story, or else my plots and characters start getting intertwined. My crit partners have had to point out I've used the wrong hero's name--more than once! So, Graham and Colleen are packed away, and it's back to Gordon, Megan and Justin.

I found some fun stuff while I was goofing off (and it's a good think I didn't find these sites on a 'work' day, or I'd have goofed off then, too.)

First, some fun with words: Wordle creates a word collage (or is it a montage?) from anything you plug in. I plugged in the URL to this blog, and this is what I got. (If you click on the image, you can see it enlarged.) You can play with colors, fonts, orientation -- like I said: too much fun.



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Then, I found another site, Jigsaw Planet, where I spent even more time playing and creating. Click on the book cover image and see what happens.

I made puzzles for a few of my covers, plus some easy ones for my grandson.

Next, a cartoon sent by my friend who sees no point to any Social Networking. Given I've got a book signing scheduled for November 7th, I thought it was worth sharing here.




And, last, I'd like to share this recipe. Anyone else remember George Burns and Gracie Allen? (Say Good night, Gracie."



This is her recipe for pot roast:

Gracie Allen's Classic Recipe for Roast Beef

1 large Roast of beef
1 small Roast of beef

Take the two roasts and put them in the oven.
When the little one burns, the big one is done

Tomorrow, my guest is someone near and dear: my son, the photographer. He recently led a group of photographer to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Trust me, you won't want to miss his pictures.

What's in a Definition?

What I'm reading: Motor Mouth, by Janet Evanovich

Apparently, there were some serious issues with Twitter for a couple of days at the end of last week. Since that's one networking site I have yet to join, I remained blissfully unaware and suffered no withdrawal symptoms. To date, this cartoon in yesterday's paper sums up my feelings about Twitter.



Moving on to the topic at hand: I ran into a surprising opinion about the book's classification when one on-line review site listed Romance among the genres it would accept for review, with the caveat that it didn't review erotica.

Reading further, I was astonished to find that the review site's definition of erotica was any book where explicit sex occurs on the page. Their reviewer was kind enough to look at the love scenes before accepting the book for review (saving me time and money), and based on that, declared the book erotica. Now, I'll agree that my love scene might have had some erotic elements, but does that make the book erotica?

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According to definitions I've researched, "erotica" is:

"A genre of literature that includes sexually explicit details as a primary feature."

Note "primary feature." Two love scenes in a 350 page book don't exactly constitute "primary."

Typically, in an erotic romance, sex drives the relationship, where in a traditional romance, the relationship drives the sex. So, in erotica, characters will more often than not have their sexual relationship first, and the romance comes later.

Given that all my books have sex on the page, and all reviewers to this point have considered the heat level, "mildly sensual" I was a bit surprised to find out that my books would be considered erotica by anyone's standards. But it's their site, and they're certainly allowed to make the rules. And, I suppose, their own definitions.

If I had submitted any of my books to Ellora's Cave, the 500 pound gorilla in the erotica market (although they've copyrighted their own definition of "Romantica), They'd have hit the 'reject' button so fast my head would still be spinning. Heck, my mother doesn't think my love scenes are all that steamy. She recommends the books to her friends.

My issue stemmed from their site saying they review the Romance genre. Again – they have the right to define their own standards, but as I look back over the big-name, best-selling author romance books I've read over the past year, I don't think many would have qualified for a review. And they're definitely not shelved or labeled "Erotica."

To me, it's kind of like saying, "We're restaurant critics. We review French, American, Italian, Thai, Chinese, and Indian food. However, if you serve Chinese food, be aware that we do not want to review any dishes made with soy sauce."

This wasn't a case of a member of the review staff not wanting to review erotic romance, it was the board policy. Seems to me that if they're going to be that restrictive in their definition of Romance, they should simply not offer to review it at all. Or say they review "Sweet Romance."

Okay – that's my opinion, to be taken for what it's worth.

Meanwhile, I've decided to give a shot at entering one of my manuscripts in a contest. They've got a word count limit and require a synopsis be part of it. So, the longer the synopsis, the fewer words of story. Trying to balance getting the total words to include enough manuscript to hook a judge with enough synopsis to make sense will be a challenge. It's been several years since I entered this kind of a contest.

I've also submitted workshop proposals for a couple of conferences. We'll see how those pan out.

And I exceeded my weekly word count goal by Friday, which meant I could spend time with our son who was home for his high school reunion. (Although most of his time was spent doing the male-bonding thing with hubby, where they spoke photography, or hanging with his friends, or playing with his iPhone.) Still, it's nice to visit, even for short periods of time. And he's shown me more apps for the iPhone than I could ever dream of. Given that I don't have an iPhone, I didn't think they were as cool as he did.

A reminder – my August contest, where I'm giving away an ARC of WHEN DANGER CALLS, runs through the end of the month. This is an Advance Reader Copy, and by now, is one of very few in existence. Yes, you have to jump through a couple of hoops to enter (answering a two-part question), but the answer's easy to find on my website, and no purchases are required. I'll even autograph it for the winner.

Tomorrow, my guest is author Nancy J. Cohen, who will be filling this slot with excellent tips about finding inspiration.

What is a Friend?

What I'm reading: Sworn to Silence, by Linda Castillo

First, my news. Yesterday, my Five Star release, WHEN DANGER CALLS was a featured read at Barbara Vey's Publisher's Weekly blog.

I'm still working on my short story, with a goal of a complete first draft by Monday. I'm not as far along as I'd hoped, but endings scare the heck out of me. I have too much fun with the writing, and can never seem to wrap things up effectively the first time around. Or the second. As I was told when I started writing, I have a beginning, a middle, and more middle.


Okay, and I watched a little too much Wimbledon. But I've thrown in the next plot twist, and have to figure out how to have "the end" hit at the right word count.

But none of this is related to the topic of today's post, unless you compare watching tennis to another time suck, Social Networking, which is the topic of today's post.

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Back in May, I blogged about Looking at the New Old Days, and included some comic strips about Social Networking Sites.

The influence of these phenomena seem to be growing exponentially. And will Dictionary.com have to revise it's definition of "friend" which has 5 definitions as a noun, and one as a verb, which it says is rare usage, and really means befriend?

Do I play? A little. I have sites at a lot of the networks. One I haven't yet succumbed to is Twitter (and there's now a whole new definition of "tweet", which has yet to hit the dictionary).

I check in to my Facebook page a few times a day. I notice a few people have dozens and dozens of updates that are fed through their Twitter accounts. Trust me, I'm not THAT interested. And even more importantly, I'M not that interesting. I think Brian Crane says it very well in his Pickles comic strip


Nor am I that interesting. Friends, Followers, whatever. I have to agree with Wiley Miller in the June 30th Non Sequitur comic strip.



When we're lucky enough to sell our house, I'm pretty sure none of those hundreds of friends I have on my social network pages are going to be helping us move.

Yes, I know there's not a lot of "meat" in today's post. I was going to talk about the differences between suspense and thrillers, but I'm saving that for another time. Please come back tomorrow for the conclusion of Detective Hussey's Exhumation chapter.

Do You Twitter?

What I'm reading: Easy Prey, by John Sandford

Note: once again, I've lost the sidebar in IE -- Use Firefox!

Social Networking:

I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into MySpace and Facebook. Now I'm hearing it's all about Twitter. I'm not ready for that -- I can't imagine people being interested in 140 character bites. I try to keep these posts varied and interesting, and away from the minute-by-minute accounting of my daily actions. If I do have something I feel is worthy of sharing, I'd like to think it takes more than 140 characters to say it.

(The above paragraph is 427 characters with spaces.)

If I were going to write about my everyday happenings, I could tell you about ...

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how much of a hassle it was to register for on-line access to the mail-order pharmacy my new health insurance uses. It wouldn't accept me as a member, although I'd filled out everything correctly (so I thought). I got the 'if you're having trouble, call the Customer Service number on the card.'

Here we go againwas my first thought. After answering a dozen questions via their voice recognition software I got put through to a human. The wrong one, but at least I got through, and was transferred to someone else who told me I had to first register with the Florida website, and THEN I could finish the pharmacy site. So, I jumped through those hoops and went back and tried again.

There's a field for entering one's ID number. I copied mine from my card. It didn't all fit. I tried again leaving the letters off the front. Yet another no go. I called the pharmacy people (heck with Customer Service) and was told, "Leave off all the letters except the H." Still no go, which I told her (I wasn't letting her off the line until I fixed it.) She read the number back to me. Turns out, you're also supposed to leave off the last two digits! Sheesh.

Oh - we were talking about Twitter, weren't we. The prompt for this post was the following:

Ben Schott has a blog where he introduces new vocabulary words for the never-ending demands of our society. Since I'd been seeing so much blog traffic about Twitter, this one caught my eye:

Twitturgy

Religious Tweeting. (Twitter + liturgy.)

The Web site
Church Solutions recently urged:

Quick, write the shortest devotion you can! Such is the latest trend, which has created a new church-world portmanteau: twitturgy.

According to the site:

Pastors who build a network of Twitter followers in their congregations now try to reach them all week long. The phenomenon makes e-mail devotions seem so passé.

In an earlier post, Church Solutions outlined “three reasons every pastor should use Twitter regularly:”

Your sermons can become more relevant

You can remove the “barrier” between pulpit and pew.

You can intensify your prayer life.

Be sure to come back tomorrow, when Homicide Hussey's chapter explains "The Noise in the Attic."