As I’ve been slowly working on building a ‘cadre’ of ‘followers’ at Twitter, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that Twitter for people like me, which is basically anyone that is trying to sell either themselves or their product, is nothing better than a giant flea market with tens of thousands of stalls all packed into one Expo Center and every stall has a person shouting at the top of their lungs the wares they are offering.

I won’t say that Twitter isn’t going to end up being useful, and for the moment it is kind of interesting that I can tweet morons like Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan (@RepMikeRogers) who claim that the CISPA bill making its way through Congress is only being opposed by ‘14 year olds living in the basement‘.

Or this idiot Peter Hansen, a State Rep from New Hampshire (a state that has a female governor and an all-female delegation to Congress, as well as their Supreme Court’s Chief Justice and the State Speaker of the House being female as well), that decided to call women ‘vaginas’ instead of women. And the most galling fucking thing about it is he violated John Scalzi’s Apologies: What, When, and How? rules by saying:

“Can there be any doubt my comment is being misinterpreted and taken completely out of context?”

Which is Asshole for:

“I’m not sorry at all for saying such an offensive thing.”

The unfortunate thing is this guy doesn’t have a Twitter account, so I can’t rank him out publicly. Not that he’d even understand what Twitter is, since it looks like he’s about four hundred years old. And this isn’t to say that older persons can’t be hip and current with technology and social media…but let’s be honest and admit that a guy who still calls women ‘vaginas’ (and probably worse when he’s not using official legislative emails) is still stuck in the past when blacks and women and the Chinese, hell even the Irish and Italians were never to be considered equal.

But back to my original thought….Twitter for the moment is just annoying and confusing. The pool of authors and publishers is so huge as to be unwieldy and chaotic. I’ve only got 200 followers now, and I follow 300 or so. By the time I actually get a tweet written and posted, there have been 12-15 other tweets from everyone I’m following on a slow cycle, and upwards of 50 on busy tweet days.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the people that have 10,000+ followers and they follow 10,000 plus other Twitter users. The only thing that I can clearly see at this point is everyone hawking their wares repeatedly over the course of a day. I have to think that some of these Twitter tweeters or whatever they call themselves (besides author or writer or whatever they are in ‘real life’) have had to hire someone to manage their account, commanding that they send out a tweet every 30-120 seconds as an advertisement for the rest of us to buy their goods or services.

Since I don’t want to be labeled a Luddite (good luck with that by the way), I will play the game for a while. At least on Twitter I don’t get the annoying bigots and haters that plague Facebook like a venereal disease at a border town whorehouse. And Tumblr is awesome, but every time I go there, instead of promoting myself, I end up scrolling through endless pages of cat memes, uplifting support comments to suicidal or LGBT persons, and more fucking Naruto/Doctor Who/Supernatural fandom than there are humans on this planet.

I guess the real answer to promoting myself is going to be first writing something that people want to read, give it away  to a bunch of people that will read it and leave a review of it (something I’m going to rant about in my next post), and then writing more words that even more people will want to buy.

Basically…I’m just not buying that Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or any social networking scheme is going to help me, or anyone else like me that isn’t already a household name sell a single book. The people that will sell my books for me are you, the people who read them and enjoy them. Should that actually happen anyway 😉