Posts tagged Twitter

Click for large view. Via Mediabistro.

1) Carina Press Spring 2012 call for submissions — what the Carina Press editors on would like read and acquire. Somebody send Mallory some historical mysteries so I can read them, too!

2) How I Brought Game of Thrones’ Ned Stark to Life — a cool look at the process of creating the artwork for a Game of Thrones calendar at io9.

3) Giving Birth to Bitterblue — interesting article from Publishers Weekly about the book’s long road to publication, showing that even successful authors struggle and need editors!

4) 10 Amazing North American Libraries — at mental_floss.

5) A bunch of Harlequin editors recently joined Twitter. An up-to-date list of Harlequin employees on Twitter (including yours truly) is here.

Harlequin is having an online conference to find new writers and help them craft a great romance novel! Everything takes place Nov 7-11 via blogs, live chats, podcasts, webinars, tweets and more. At the end, there will be a writing contest where the winner gets their book published! The main site for the event is www.SoYouThinkYouCanWrite.com, where you will find the calendar of events, FAQs, info about the contest, etc.

Personally, my role is tweeting everything over at www.Twitter.com/HarlequinSYTYCW, so if you want updates be sure to follow that account (not just @HarlequinBooks) and the hashtag #SYTYCW2.

Some common questions I’ve received so far about SYTYCW:

Q: Where do I register?

A: You don’t! Just read or attend what you like.

Q: What if I miss something?

A: Even if you can’t attend an event live, this year we’ll be archiving everything (including transcripts of live chats and playbacks of webinars) to watch at your leisure. Everything will be archived here.

Q: Do I need a complete manuscript to participate?

A: For the final writing contest, you must submit a completed manuscript but the deadline isn’t until December 15 so you have a few weeks to work on it. For daily assignments, you only need what is required for that day (a synopsis, scene, etc.) if you choose to enter it for a chance to get an editor to critique it. All other events are more informational, so you don’t have to have written a single word to benefit.

Have another question? Check the FAQs or leave me a comment :)

One of the most common questions I receive is, “How do I get more Twitter followers?” One of the best answers is, “Get retweeted.” It’s the “and they tell two friends…” method of getting your name out there in social media.

So how do you get your messages retweeted? Here are my five top tips — and a link to a great article with even more tips at #4.

1. Keep it well under the 140 character limit. At minimum, leave enough characters for “RT @yourusername” for classic retweets. Even more is better so people can add their own comments.
2. Use a link shortener (like http://bit.ly, http://goo.gl/ or Twitter’s built-in shortener). Because trying to copy a super long link, especially one that is cut off on Twitter, is really annoying. Also, see #1 above. 
3. Don’t automate tweets. I believe the best tweets are crafted specifically for Twitter, not automated or cross-posted from another platform like Facebook. In general, I HATE automated tweets of new blog posts that include part of the post text. There is a very nice romance blog out there that I would like to RT more but they use automated tweets that do this. The result are long, cut off and incomprehensible messages so I don’t even know what the blog post is about. There are ways to set up automated tweets that look better, like how new blog posts are tweeted from @CarinaPress with the following structure: “New post from CarinaPress.com: Blog Post Title. Shortlink.” It’s short, clear as to what the content is and where, and usually has effective copy if the blog post title is nice and catchy.
4. Use the most retweetable words and phrases and other tips from this Fast Company article. <— What they said.
5. Tweet at the right time. Various reports agree the most effective time to tweet is between 4-6pm Eastern time: East coasters are winding down for the day, West coasters are on lunch break. If you’re tweeting something aimed at a different time zone, schedule it to go live at an appropriate time — not when your target audience is asleep.

Via @MargaretAtwood, the campaign to save Toronto public libraries gets retro with reworked WWI and WWII posters. View them all here. This one is my favourite:

And yesterday, Failbook posted three social media propaganda posters. Bet you can guess which one I liked best of those: