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Hi everyone,

Happy Saturday! I hope you had a good week. I just came back from a writing conference with the 20booksto50k gang. I learned a bit more about self-publishing, so that was pretty cool, but I was a bit frustrated about the lack of safety precautions especially since I still haven't totally recovered from when I got sick back in March. I have another behind the scenes for you this week. This one is about social media. So before writing, I'll admit I sucked at social media. I'm still not great at it, but one thing I AM good at is researching, so in order to get good at social media, I picked a platform that I felt was a good fit for me and did a bunch of google searches on how to up engagement on Twitter. Here's what I learned.

1. Stick to 2-3 relevant hashtags. Too many can actually lower engagement. Try to make them fit in naturally if possible.
2. Find hashtags relevant to your community. The big ones I use are #Writingcommunity #WritersQ #Shamelessselfpromosaturday and #writers. I'm working on expanding to reader hashtags too
3. Respond to other people's posts.
4. Try to post or comment frequently. It doesn't have to be every day, but when you post usually go for multiple times that day if possible.
5. Start conversations and ask questions so you're contributing to the community
6. Don't just promote. Let people get to know the you outside of writing. 80-90% should be info. and interaction about you as a person/writer. 10-20% can be promo

This week on the writing front I wasn't very productive. I mostly focused on getting training done for the new writing job and I got to the final interview for a Virtual assistant job, so I did some writing for that. One thing I did work on was editing. I edited more of Amy's Rebellion for the audiobook narrator. Yay for that. Next week, I'm hoping to finish those corrections for Amy's Rebellion so the narrator can get started and then I want to finish doing the reverse outline for chapters 16-21 of Snow's Captive so that I can send them to my awesome beta readers in this group. For now, Snow's Captive episode 15 is officially live.

That's all I've got for you this week. I just have a one more question for you.

What's your favorite social media platform?

Personally, I use a bit of everything for marketing purposes, but my favorite platforms so far have been Twitter and Tiktok. I'm as surprised as you are by the Tiktok one. I think it's because there's a big LGBTQIA+ community and autistic/ADHD community there.

Have a great day and stay safe.

Sincerely,

Julia

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