November
10th
I read a lot. I read for work (and work [and even work]), and I’ve always meant to start writing book reviews on this blog. As you can tell, that hasn’t happened. And it probably never will.
I’ve been reading a lot about Twitter and different ways it can be used. Several television characters (for example, the character on Gilmore Girls and Mad Men) have fictional twitter accounts. Fellow b5 blogger Nikki Katz is doing something pretty cool on Twitter right now–she’s chronicling the (fictional) life of a high school girl on Twitter at My Life in 140.
There’s a lot of great stuff going on over at Twitter, but it’s also pretty hard to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, who you should follow, what you should post, etc. It’s a lot of fun figuring this kind of thing out.
And in that spirit, I’ve decided that I can handle reviewing books in 140 characters. Today I launched yet another Twitter account in which to do this: Books in 140. Book reviews. In 140 characters. That’s practically no characters at all! I can do this!
Feel free to share yours by emailing me, DMing me, @replying me or however else you want!
I’m also thinking about twittering a public-domain book, one sentence per day. Or writing my own book via Twitter (ha!). I’d love to learn about more book-related projects on Twitter. What ideas do you have?
Great idea Erin! Am following already!
And thanks for pointing to Nikki Katz’s My Life in 140. Talk about getting into character! This is a neat approach for fiction writers.
I think you’ve got a great experiment. My hypothesis is that anyone can technically do a solid review of a book in 140 characters or less, and still have a relatively major impact. It will depend on that person’s influence of course — I guess so and so can simply say ” is brilliant!” .
I’d recommend you try that out and make use of POPurl/Tweetburner and see how many clickthroughs you get
btw…that is a lot of reading you do – and I didn’t even know you changed jobs!
Cool!
Ehren-I am, thankfully, on a backlog of books I’ve read to be reviewed (whoo!) expect a tweet slow-down in a few days!
I started at UTP 2 weeks ago in their marketing dept. My Kate Walker contract was up and they could only renew it on a part-time basis. Thankfully the job hunt was quick!
Thanks for the heads-up about Tweetburner! I’ll definitely give that a try!
Ellen-I think Nikki’s idea is pretty cool. i’m excited to see what other creative types try to do on twitter as it becomes more accepted/mainstream!
Hi Erin,
What an awesome use for Twitter. I’ll be following you and taking notes. I work with authors to help them utilize social networking for book promotion. Good luck!
Hi Cheryl,
Thanks! I’m a big believer in authors using social media and I’m excited to follow you and see what you have to say about the subject!
Erin.