The Easiest Way to Get Votes: Part One

As a writer hoping to be published with SOOP, you know that you need to get votes, but how do you get them once people like your mother, your spouse (whom you had to bribe), and that crazy uncle that had to be told eight times how to do it have voted? It’s actually not as difficult as you would think. You don’t have to buy votes or call in a favor from the President of the US. You don’t even have to ask Santa for votes as your only Christmas gift. In fact, it’s quite easy to get votes. It’s called TWITTER. In the first part of this series, we’ll look at how you can optimize your profile to get votes.

If you’re not on Twitter already, you should be in all honesty. It is, in my opinion, the easiest way in which you can bring in votes for your book. There are five things that I believe make or break an author’s Twitter account.

Your avatar needs to be a nice picture of you. You don’t need to be in a three piece suit like I am in one of my avatars or a wedding dress, but look nice, and don’t use a cat as your avatar. They’re cute, but they don’t tell someone anything about you. Oh, and leaving your avatar as the automatic egg is a sure way to not get any followers in the first place or to be unfollowed.

2. Your header is also very important. It sets the mood of your profile. I personally like using pictures of cathedrals or basilicas as my header. My largest account has a picture of the interior of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC as its header, which is perfect given the fact that my book Sealed is very much about Christianity, saints, relics, and cathedrals.

3. Your twitter handle is also incredibly important. It needs to be memorable. Rather than doing something like @ChRiS_L_E1626, choose something like @BasilicaCEO, my main handle.

4. Your bio determines whether or not you’re going to be followed. If a bio says “husband, father of two, brother, friend”, I’m going to be immediately bored. It’s great to be married, great to be a father, great to be a brother, and great to be a friend, but those things don’t really set you apart. If you said “husband of Oprah” or “father of LeBron James” or “brother of Adam Levine”, that would be interesting and worth following. Make your bio stand out.

5. In terms of getting votes, the link that you choose is perhaps the most important since no one can vote for your book unless they have the link regardless of how wonderful you make your book idea sound. Make sure that you include one, and consider using Bitly or Tinyurl to shorten it.

Check back next week for the next portion of this series!

Happy Vote Collecting!