Twitter Tips and Tricks (To Avoid)

As I approach my lofty goal of 5,000 twitter followers in one year (Joined July 4th, 2011), I wanted to share some twitter tips for those of you who may be new to the whole thing.

I love the twitter follow-unfollow trick to try to inflate your numbers. People follow you and then a few days later, unfollow you, thinking you wont see or find out. People...we know. Don't do it.

With the amount of twitter apps, products and programs out there, we will find out soon enough. I'm not going to name any of the programs, but suffice to say there are a few and they are free for the most part. Anyone that unfollows me will also be unfollowed, too. Just FYI. So, my advice: Unfollow at your own risk.

Also, the True-tweet validation thing...I don't do it anymore. If you require authentication, I'm just not going to follow you. It's nothing personal, I just don't have the time and energy to do it all. I do follow most everyone back who follows me. Unless I find that you are a spammer or a 'team follow back' or something like that.

Any artist, writer, reader, musician, actor or wanna-be-whatever, I will follow you back!

And one more thing...if someone doesn't follow you back after 2 hours, don't unfollow them if you can help it. Give someone a reasonable amount of time to follow you back before assuming they don't want to.

I hope this has been enlightening to my friends in the twitter-verse and those would-be-tweeters attempting to enter said lands.

Please use twitter safely and avoid drinking and typing. Maybe.

Thanks for listening to my rant.Oh, And MATURATION PROCESS will be FREE again for the final two days of the KDP Select this Friday & Saturday (May 31 & June 1st)  for those who missed it. Enjoy!

All of my work can be found on AMAZON -- Kindle versions here!

See you in Wothlondia! Cheers!

Please visit MY HOME PAGE to enjoy an extended reading experience, see direct links to purchase my full length novel, Covenant of the Faceless Knights, the short stories: Wothlondia Rising, and to see what else Ashenclaw Studios, LLC has in store in the future!

Photo from Stock.xchng

All maps, names and content copyright Ashenclaw Studios 2012 unless otherwise noted.

What is Pinterest?

Seriously... What is Pinterest?


My wife is crazily addicted to the site. She enjoys looking at kittens, funny pics, recipes, dresses, clothes, shoes, etc. and I have found her on there for several hours at a time. She is obviously not the only one! I have spoken to some people at work (mostly the ladies, mind you) who enjoy going on Pinterest for the same thing. Just browsing the pictures for anything that strikes their fancy.

I have to hand it to the creators...the idea is pure genius.

I want to know what we can do as authors to connect with other authors/artists/creative people to help promote each other there or share links to your own sites, etc. I have just started posting pics of book covers of mine and a few other authors and want to know if anyone wants to start doing this sort of thing with me.

If interested, please leave me a comment with a link to your Pinterest page and your amazon page and we will go from there.

My Amazon author page is HERE and my PINTEREST page is HERE. If you post up here with a comment, I will do my best to Pin your site ASAP! Happy sharing!

I hope you enjoyed the sample! See you in Wothlondia! Cheers!

Please visit MY HOME PAGE to enjoy an extended reading experience, see direct links to purchase my full length novel, Covenant of the Faceless Knights, the short stories: Wothlondia Rising, and to see what else Ashenclaw Studios, LLC has in store in the future!

All maps, names and content copyright Ashenclaw Studios 2012 unless otherwise noted.

Does Social Media Help Your Sales?

I was thinking about this the other day and am up in the air about it. I think it does help to at least get the word out, but I mean there are so many tweets and posts out there that it is difficult to find your target audience—or for them to find you. I started a twitter account last July 4th and it has steamrolled much faster than I would have imagined. I am pushing for 5k followers by this July (just a minor goal of mine). I am on Facebook and Goodreads and even joined Pinterest, which I am not quite sure about yet.

Goodreads I very much enjoy because it is about readers sharing info, reviews, opinions, etc on…well: books! Kind of cool. I did a giveaway there for my first novel and gave two books away, and it was a smashing success I believe. I would like to give more kindle versions away of my short stories, but Goodreads only allows hard copies to be given away. *sad face*

So, I joined these sites to connect with people of like mind, to share back and forth our products, services and to share stories. It is working for the most part…except for the sales, which I assume will come over time.

I have met some amazing people on social media and enjoy the company, too. With a full time job and writing as a second job, social media kind of falls by the wayside. I would love to personally interact with people one on one more than I do, but there are just not enough hours in the day, so I hope no one is offended. I see this happen especially when followers grow so quickly.

I think that the blog is one superb tool for that, where I can interact with people as they respond to posts. Twitter feed is especially tough, because the tweets go by so fast! I try to respond personally at least a few times a day when my 'tweeps' talk to me. The new interface seems easier to manage as well.

I also find myself on Facebook less and less. I liken the site to MTV. When MTV came out, they played music videos…now it is all about reality TV shows and whatnot and they have gotten away from playing music. Facebook was like this in that it was a social media site for people to share events and fun things…now it is more of a game site with all of the apps and games with occasional chatting. These are just my opinions, mind you, from my own perspective. I still maintain a presence, but find myself there maybe once a day, to wish people happy birthday and to share a site or article that I find.


Does anyone have any different opinions about social media? Do you feel that promoting your material works? Have you met any people with which you have connected? I’d love to hear everyone’s opinions, so have at it!

See you in Wothlondia! Cheers!

Please visit MY HOME PAGE to enjoy an extended reading experience, see direct links to purchase Covenant of the Faceless Knights and to see what else Ashenclaw Studios, LLC has in store in the future!

Photo from Stock.xchng.

All maps, names and content copyright Ashenclaw Studios 2011 unless otherwise noted.