Twitter or Twatter

I've brushed upon this before, but I feel compelled to do it again.  Twitter.  Is it actually worth wasting time on?

I'm convinced that nobody on my Twitter list actually reads any of my tweets.  How can they?  My tweets must get lost amongst the myriad marketing tweets from other Indie writers and associated spam.  Yet we have to maintain a Twitter presence, being writers, in spite of the fact that we're limited to 140 characters.  Yeah, right, try to find a writer who can only write 140 characters ...

Tonight, I was trying desperately to find a reviewer for my latest book, Besotted.  But 98% of reviewers were looking for YA books to review and the remaining 2%, they were looking for YA books that didn't feature vampires or anything supernatural.  What the fuck has gone wrong with this world?  I'm presuming that adults still read books?  And yet everybody seems to have gone mad for YA fiction.  Indie writers seem to write nothing else, as though they think that by having one of their main characters a young werewolf and the other a teenage girl with parents who ignore her will make them a best selling writer.  It won't.  Of course it won't.

I'm not averse, totally, to reading YA fiction.  I read "The Book Thief" a few years ago when it first came out.  Some YA books can be compelling or otherwise intriguing.  But must the Kindle market be saturated with this kind of stuff?  To see a woman in her forties writing YA fiction, I don't know ... it just depresses me.  Clearly, they can write, but their imagination cannot stretch beyond adolescence?

Anyway, I'm doing what most writers do.  I'm digressing (hell, isn't that what editors are for?  To wipe out our digressions?).  Back to Twitter.

Here's the thing.  If Twitter was actually a network for people who were actually interested in what other people tweeted, then we'd probably all be able to sell a few more books.  See, if I see a book advertised and it's something I think I might like to read, I'll download it to my Kindle.  I'll even pay for it.  But on Twitter (unlike Facebook) there is no interaction with the people who tweet.  If you comment on their tweet, they never reply.

The problem with Twitter is that there is a lot of twaddle on there.  And writers, they don't have enough characters in a tweet to say what they need to say about their book.  And nobody can really see what other people have been saying about that writer's book, because everything is so disjointed and unconnected.

I've been getting some pretty good feedback about Besotted.  People have said it's the best book I've written, though it has a way to go to outsell "die Stunde X", my current bestseller.  But can I find a reviewer to give an honest review?  Can I hell.  Well, bollocks to it.  I'm not going to write YA fiction.  I'm not going to sell out.  But here's a thought.  If you're here, reading this blog post, and you haven't read Besotted, you need to ask yourself why.

It's only a couple of quid to download it.  That's less than a pint of beer or a large cappuccino from Starbucks or Costa.  Go on, go here, download it, read it, and then review it.  I love to find out what people think about my books, even if they don't like them.