After self publishing my first book Poppy on Amazon Kindle exclusively I was faced with a daunting task: Get people to buy the book. I took some fairly easy steps such as setting up a Twitter account, Facebook account and a GoodReads account. When I realized that one of my first Twitter followers was an author I gushed with enthusiasm. I thought to myself, “This is it, a real-live author likes me and then we will become friends and she will recommend me to her agent….” Yeah, not so much.

While social networking is clearly an important step for self published authors, I never realized how many of us there are out there. I found myself a little discouraged, realizing that my Twitter posts were basically being drowned out by others with the same goals as mine. I found it hard to interact with people because it was difficult to respond to what was basically an advertisement. And it was hard to keep up. For every one post I would try and respond to, eight new tweets had arrived on my feed.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it is a bad thing to advertise you and your product. There are a lot of influential people floating around on Twitter, and maybe if the right person at the right time sees your post they will contact you. But I also think it is important to realize that even though you are competing for the same prize, we are all in the same boat. Take a minute to reach out to a new writer or a new blogger. I guarantee they will not forget that you took a moment to say hello. And the truth of the matter is, maybe they will end up being your elusive golden ticket. Maybe they will end up with an agent and say…”Hey, you know I have this friend…”