A simple trick to dominate Twitter

12 Aug 2015

Check this out:

RT @AMZ0NE A SciFi author reflects on the Myth of Equal Opportunity. http://t.co/zyqSzMRsnk pic.twitter.com/a4JhtQ9uqA #SciFi #amreading

— Steve McEllistrem (@SteveMcEllis) August 12, 2015

That’s basically, the coolest Tweet in the world. It’s perfect.

1. It’s CONTENT, not book promotion. It’s an interesting article that might appeal to Steve’s Target readers.

2. He made a well-designed image that restates the benefits, positions him as an expert, and grabs the eye.

3. It has a specific call to action (read the blog post).

And that’s unfortunately where it breaks down… brilliant post on Twitter, Steve is doing everything right there, but the link back to his website leaves some to be desired.

The article is good, but a little short and basic. It’s about opportunity bias.

But the article just ends, and below it is his sci-fi book cover. Luckily, his covers are decent: decent enough to work. But the web design is of far lessor design quality than the covers. That doesn’t matter too much, as long as all the right parts are there… but the article ends abruptly without connecting at all to the book, so I’m thinking… what is this sci fi book doing under this post about opportunity bias? It should have ended with a link, like “these are issues I had to wrestle with while writing my book X, about Y… click here to get it.”

Also, the homepage has a “Buy the book link” which is good – though it’s not an ideal offer.

And weirdly the cover on Amazon doesn’t match the cover on the website (and I actually like the covers on the website better) so that’s a bit jarring. He does have 23 reviews on amazon already so he’s good there (although personally I’d set it at .99 until I got 100 reviews, his 4.99 entry price to the series is going to slow him down).

The worst thing, however, is that he doesn’t seem to have an email list signup, which makes me cry. He’s working harder than he needs to. Anyway, A+++ for Twitter marketing, Steve’s a pro. C for author website, it’s unfortunately about on par for indie author websites, and could be doing much more.

(I didn’t mean to single out Steve, he just caught my attention with his awesome Twitter post… check out his books if you read sci-fi).