To the few, the proud, the truly demented - I have Tweet News. Quacking Alone Romances is now on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter @quackingalone by clicking the blue button in the sidebar. The button, like everything else on this site, was installed and designed by my amazing hubby who hasn't killed me yet - though I know he's been tempted, especially tonight.
See, until a day ago I was a Twirgin - a Twitter virgin. Not only had I never used the service, I'd never even seen it. But I heard that it was a great marketing and communication tool. In keeping with our plan to build sales and hopefully develop QA Romances into a full-time way to support our family, my hubby and I have been working on different areas. Hubby's busy bundling the Forever Series into 1 ebook we'll sell for $5.99. In the course of that, he discovered some formatting problems with Sixth Sense we weren't aware of so he had to go in and reformat the whole ebook. The bundle should be up very soon at Amazon, Smashwords and all of SW's great partners (Apple, B&N, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, etc.). The revised and re-formatted version of Sixth Sense should be up soon as well.
In addition to writing the WIP (The Duke of Eden), my part of the job is to work on marketing. Twitter was the obvious next step, but I took it with great fear and trepidation. It still scares me because I'm very confused about the whole thing. I got lots of advice that a good way to tweet was to have Facebook feed Twitter or maybe it was that it'd be good to have Twitter feed Facebook. Anyway, I understood something should feed something and I emailed hubby to ask him to work his magibytes and make that happen.
Understandably, he got a little confused by my e-mail and took the bold leap of coming in and actually talking to me about it. Did I want Twitter to feed my personal FB page or the QA page? Or, did I want my personal FB page or the QA page to feed Twitter?
First, I asked him what he thought. He growled and looked around for something to bite. I hid the youngest and asked him to please have the QA FB page feed twitter. He headed off to his magic cave to work his wizardry.
After a bit I thought about it and changed my mind. I grabbed a shield and crept down to the cave entrance and asked hubby to have Twitter feed the QA FB page. He emitted a stream of fire that destroyed the shield and seemed to be headed for me. I quickly thanked him again for the Twitter button on the pages and told him to hold off. For now, we won't have anything feed anything. So Twitter has random thoughts about writing, TV, my life, my insanity and other tidbits that you can't find anywhere else.
In my one day of tweeting, I've found the service is an interesting way to keep up with news and events in the world of romance and in the lives of some newsworthy folks. I'm already following about 53 tweeters, including a whole bunch in the romance world. I'm also following Shonda Sunshine (Rhimes) - the brilliant creator of Grey's Anatomy. This morning she tweeted a wish for everyone to enjoy the weekend. I tweeted an inane reply that I'm sure she never read. But it was a tiny (wee, miniscule and nearly nonexistent) way to communicate with someone I really admire. That's pretty darned neat right there.
I'm following Sarah at Smart Bitches and Jane of Dear Author and both have sent out some informative info. Season4Romance seems to have insight into everything, everywhere. Smexybooks has passed along some good info as has Reviewromance. I've just found a couple of others, including one that sounds right up my alley called Romancingrakes. I had to follow Amanda Hocking because I find her very inspiring (I don't care how much stuff she hoards in her living room).
I have 8 tweeters following me. Perhaps many of you who've been on the service a while find that number pathetically low, but for my first day I think it's okay. A big HOLLA at and thank you to the first 3 tweeter followers of QA - ChickLitandWine, BookClubWoman and Romancemama. I'm following them too. They look like great peeps to follow. Y'all should all check them out as well along with all the fine folks who have updated to follow QA since the blog post went public.
Of course, I'm hoping to connect to a bunch of readers through that great button hubby provided, despite my wishy-washy confusion about the whole thing. I've also added the twitter info to my author page at Amazon and at SW. BTW, the last few QA tweets do feed to the author page at SW. You can check out the rampant insanity there before electing to follow us on Twitter.
As I mentioned above, and yes, thanks to my indecision about having anything feed anything, for now, if you want bits and pieces of the daily zoo that is my world, you should sign up to follow Quackingalone on Twitter.
Come on, you know you want to follow us on Twitter - it's like watching the animals run the zoo.