Elaine Mansfield is the author of Leaning Into Love: A Spiritual Journey Through Grief (Larson, 2014). Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award 2015, her memoir captures your heart—from the extraordinary closeness of Elaine’s marriage to how she and Vic transformed their struggle with cancer and despair into a conscious relationship with mortality. After Vic’s death, Elaine leaned into her ongoing love as grief led her through overwhelming emotional and spiritual depths on a journey beyond their time together into her new life. Working closely with Elaine Mansfield during the past several years I observed her as a writer who pulled others to her words using social media. When I review her social media metrics over two years it tells a powerful story about how a book found its audience. More than a year after her book’s release, Elaine’s blogs continue to be routinely shared several hundred times on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. She has more than 1,000 Friends on Facebook, 4,000 followers on Twitter, and 500+ on LinkedIn. And she has engaged with most of them in conversations about the topic of death. When I hear from aspiring authors they have no interest or intention in building an audience platform online I want to introduce them to Elaine and let them hear her story of finding readers. Jill: You have a following and community of readers with whom you engage on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + that is the envy of many aspiring authors. I know…

Nearly a billion people have registered accounts on Twitter and 100 million of them use it every day. Three quarters of them on a mobile device. As a writer, it’s easy to dismiss Twitter. If you’re an author, it’s a mistake to do so. If your readers are over 50 years old or under 10, you won’t find them on Twitter, right? Wrong question. If you think of Twitter as a soap box to sell through self-promotion, think again. It doesn’t work that way. Twitter is not the place to plug your publication. You’ll see plenty of self-published authors reducing their premise and pitch to 140 characters but that’s not how good books get sold. So turn your thinking inside out about Twitter. Twitter is a research tool. One interesting fact you may overlooked about Twitter users is that 44% have registered an account and never sent a Tweet. What might those Tweeps do when they log into their accounts and don’t tweet? I believe they are gathering information. Not all of them are online shopping. You can’t read other people’s tweets unless you have an account so those who like to lurk online – read, think, and slip silently by as an eavesdropper – are onto something important about the platform. It’s about reading as much as tweeting. To use Twitter as a search tool, use a hashtag and a keyword in the search bar and hit enter. Bam! You have tapped into a data stream which can lead…

The launch of Green Bay author Melissa Gorzelanczyk’s debut Young Adult novel ARROWS (Delacorte Press, 2016) is one example of how social media can play an important role in author success. Melissa’s novel ARROWS is a modern cupid story set in present-day Wisconsin combining the fantastical elements of Greek mythology with the contemporary drama of MTV’s Teen Mom,” according to Melissa’s website. Her novel also has an element of social justice – a young woman learning how to leave a bad relationship. I asked Melissa that favorite question of up-and-coming authors: How did she find her literary agent? During a Twitter pitch party. That’s right. What’s a Twitter pitch party, you ask? Here’s how it works. Periodically on Twitter, moderators will host an event during which writers have the chance to pitch their manuscripts to agents. What’s tricky is Twitter’s 140-character limit. You must summarize your novel in a very compact and effective sentence. That’s a challenge for any writer who has faced the agony of writing a query letter, during which an author must summarize his or her novel in an accurate and enticing premise within a few short sentences. Now tighten that. “I actually recommend creating a Twitter pitch for every story that you start, even if you’re never going to pitch it that way,” Melissa says. “It makes you look at the true bones of your story.” This is an unusual way to obtain an agent. Twitter pitches aren’t a substitute for a query letter or a good…