Authors Helping Authors...

…is a hashtag I came across on Twitter a few weeks ago when I thanked a fellow writer for spreading the word about my novel, Gray Justice. His response was “My pleasure #AuthorsHelpingAuthors”. I didn’t really think much more about it until I decided to check out a book promotion website recently. I had been to the site before but had baulked at having to pay a fee, especially as I didn’t know if my book was ever going to sell. Now that I have some excellent reviews and a growing fan base (not to mention regular royalties) I looked again in more detail, and it struck me that something similar could be done quite easily (and most importantly, FREE) through Twitter.

Now some might think "Why should I tweet for other authors? I'll be pushing sales their way!" I had the very same worries when I first joined Twitter but the reader that buys their book isn't going to give up reading once they've finished it. They will simply go and find another book, and this time it might be one of yours. I regularly tweet for three authors, and all write in much the same genre as I do. That doesn't scare me at all, because I know that once the reader has finished their book they might go looking for recommendations from that author, and that leads them to me. Since I started taking part in the tweet exchange my sales have increased around 300%, and I hope theirs have gone up, too.

My idea is extremely simple. I have created a new Twitter account (@AuthorTeam - https://twitter.com/#!/authorteam) and in that account I have started a new list called AHA (Authors Helping Authors). You can find it here: https://twitter.com/#!/AuthorTeam/aha.

The plan is for as many of you authors as possible to follow this new account on Twitter (don’t worry, I will follow back and won’t tweet). I will then automatically add you to the AHA list. This might take up to 12 hours, so please be patient.

Once you have been added, here's what you have to do:

• Go to https://twitter.com/#!/AuthorTeam/aha and add it to your Favorites in your browser.


• Visit that page as often as you can (try to get there once a day if possible).


• Look through the list of tweets and retweet a few of them (and also check out what they are offering)


• If you get a retweet, please reciprocate


• If you have a tweet that you would particularly like to have retweeted, add the #AHA hashtag to it

In order to make this work we need all participating authors to try and go to the list once a day and retweets some of the posts. If we can get 100 authors to join in, the chances are your tweets could be retweeted to thousands of new readers, getting you more exposure. Even if you can only manage to visit the list a couple of times a week you will still be contributing to the author community. You might even want to schedule a few tweets a day to let others know about this venture.

I must have a thousand authors following me at the moment, and if they all joined in that would be an awesome network. So please, click the first link above and follow @AuthorTeam.

And don't forget to tell your fellow authors about it!