A little while ago I carried out an experiment and any authors reading this are going to find it VERY INTERESTING! Stay with me here, because THE FIGURES WILL ASTOUND YOU!

You see I’ve recently been wondering if Twitter really helps to sell books, and I’m not so sure it does. I think it’s great for networking, and that’s vitally important in this ever-growing community of Indie authors that didn’t really exist five years ago. Oh I know a huge number of us self-published through Print on Demand and so forth (and some may even be old enough to remember Vanity Publishing), but right now Indie publishing is exploding like no other time in history.

So Twitter is possibly one of the best mediums for networking. And it’s also brilliant for ‘platforming.’ In theory, through platforming readers are exposed to our books more often than those they leave ‘on the shelf.’

First of all HUGE respect to all those scribblers (and others trades) who spend time every evening re-tweeting various author’s postings. And a big thank you to anyone who’s ever put in time re-tweeting my own. I honestly try to reciprocate, but we all know what it’s like to get thrown into ‘Twitter Jail’ just as we’re hoping to wrap it all up for the evening.

However, I suspect that all we accomplish by tweeting each other’s tweets, if that’s the correct terminology, is that the whole thing just goes round and round and round and never really reaches the decision maker; i.e. the reader.

Well anyone can count how many tweets they tweeted, compare it to how many books they sold and come up with a figure. But that’s bollocks! I wanted indisputable proof.

So this is what I did. I have a book promotion video on YouTube (you can find it on my home page on Goodreads) that receives very good response every time someone views it, but that’s not very many people. So on a Tuesday night at mid-night I made a note of the number of people who’d viewed it to date. Then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I carried on re-tweeting other authors’ work as usual, but the only thing I promoted for myself is this YouTube video. For 3½ days this is all I did on Twitter, tweeting the same video in different formats and of course continuing to re-tweet other writers. And I kept a close eye on the results.

I now know exactly who’s re-tweeted it and because I can look and see how many followers each of these people have I also know exactly how many people this video has been re-tweeted to. Whether they’ve picked up on it or not, who knows? But that’s not the point of the exercise.

So here we go; Over a period of 84 hours my YouTube video was tweeted to 470,117 people, not far off half a million. And out of those 470,117 people who received this tweet, 26 of them have actually clicked on the link.

To put that into perspective 0.005% of people receiving the tweet about my YouTube book promotion video have actually opened it and had a look at it! That means that 99.995% of people receiving this tweet have either ignored it, which is more than likely, or had the decency to re-tweet it to their own followers, but without actually looking at themselves.

And in those 3½ days I sold one book. (I actually sold three others, but they’re not the subject of the YouTube video)

The statisticians amongst you may now be saying that some people may have received that tweet but from different twitter users. True, but some people have also re-tweeted it more than once, at different times of the day, so the figures balance each other out.

The point I’m making here is that I have to reach almost half a million people on Twitter to sell one single book. And considering I earn about £1 for every book sold, that’s a lot of hard work. If I want to sell 100 books, and earn myself £100, my tweets have to reach over 47 million people worldwide!

Does Twitter help sell books? Yeah, I’d say so, but this is a measure of the amount of hard graft that has to be put in.