Authors, Why You Should Retweet Your Book Bloggers!

Authors,

Chances are you have quite a few book bloggers on your Twitter feed that you've been neglecting. Instead, I suggest that you support your book bloggers, especially those who blog books in your genre. I'm not talking about authors who also have blogs or book bloggers who charge for reviews. I'm talking about good old fashioned book bloggers who read books or hear about books and talk about them to their people.

Why should you support them?

• They love books. The world simply needs more people who love books. In fact, they are so passionate about books they can't stop talking about them. 
• They instill a love of reading to the general public. We need more readers! 
• Your readers want to hear from them. You can't write enough books to keep your readers busy all year long. So keep them entertained with other great content. 

But what do you get out of it? As my Grandfather would say, you get 'nutin' . . . Well, maybe not exactly nothing.

• You get the appreciation of your readers. 
• You further solidify the community interest in reading. 
• If you retweet your bloggers all year long, they see your name and your books and it might inspire them to review YOUR book. No guarantee on this though as the best book bloggers operate outside of author influence. 
• If they follow you back on Twitter, which I'm sure they will, they'll see your sales and new releases and they might post about it. Again, no guarantee. 

But if you don't start the relationship, you'll never know what benefits might come of it. So take some time to examine your follower list and identify your book bloggers. Add them to a Twitter list, then make a point of retweeting them.

Bloggers,

It isn't all on us authors. I've been looking through my blogger list and I see a general lack of uniformity on book blog posts. I use an automated retweeting service and I want to retweet your book blog posts to my 19K followers. But I can only do this if you use a hashtag that my retweeting service can find.

Based on this article, and comparing to the metrics on hashtag.org, I believe the best hashtags to use are:

• #bookbloggers 
• #bookreview 

#blog also gets a lot of retweets but it is way too general. It could be a blog about luxury cars and I don't want to retweet that. I'm absolutely retweeting #bookbloggers and #bookreview though because I know my readers want to hear about that.

Be careful about the plural forms because #bookbloggers gets lots of retweets but #bookblogger gets hardly any. Likewise #bookreview gets lots of retweets, but #bookreviews gets hardly any.

Authors,

If you use an automated retweeting service (like roundteam.co), I suggest you add those hashtags to the service as part of your regular retweeting schedule. Or, for a low tech solution, you can add your bloggers to a Twitter list and just check it occasionally.

Bloggers,

I suggest you use those hashtags on your book review posts so we can find them and retweet them.

Authors and Bloggers,

Please retweet this tweet to get the word out!
https://twitter.com/Lilo_Abernathy/status/600487308454924288 

P.S. If you're a book blogger who blogs Urban Fantasy or Paranormal Romance, I want to retweet you. So let me know. 

 
P.P.S. Isn't that book image on my post soooo cool. It's a book that can be read six different ways! 

 
Happy blogging and retweeting! 

Lilo Abernathy
Author, Book Lover, Retweeter