Be Interesting.

This is another one of my note to newbie writers out there. Like all advice, it should be taken with a shotgun filled with salt (few grains are never enough, esp. not for the Winchester boys) and made sure it meshes with your own thoughts.

So, you hear a lot of thoughts on writers and advertisement, and building your own platform and your own brand. And – how do writers do this? And- can new writers use these great new tools to sell themselves, to get a book deal? Can twitter advance your career?

I say yes, yes it can. But you have to remember one important rule: be interesting. If you want to blog and tweet, don’t do it just to sell a book. Do it because you have something interesting to say, something interesting to share with other writers. Trust me, if you try and pimp yourself out and you’re not interesting, it will do you more harm than good. You need to be creative, clever, fun and memorable. You need to be cool, exciting, and say stuff that turns heads and makes people jump up and down and retweet you and link you and friend you.

If you think that’s hard, well, just don’t do it. Social media is not a platform that takes kindly to poseurs, to people who put up a cardboard facade in order to sell something. We don’t take kindly to spammers, no sir, no how.

And you know what?  You’re creative. You’re a writer. If you can’t find something interesting to say in 140 characters or less, how can you shove it into 100k for a novel?