Is Your Stuff Worth a Retweet?

This is my “duh” observation for the day, but since many people don’t seem to get it, it seems worth writing about: I’m more likely to tweet about your promotion (or retweet you) if you give me something worth retweeting.

Here’s an example of something that doesn’t compel me to help you:

• “I’m doing a big promotion for my book today.”
• “Can you tweet about my book?”

I might tweet about it if you make me feel obligated, but even if I do, it will be without much enthusiasm.

Here are the kind of things that make it much easier for me to tweet about you because—this is important—it might actually be interesting to my followers.

• “My latest blog post is about how the Kindle rankings work.”
• “Here’s a link to a free chapter from my book.”

Give me a link.
Give me something for my followers (a free PDF, for example).
Give me a piece of information that will actually be interesting to my followers.

This post was inspired by Seth Harwood, who is trying to push his collection of short stories, “A Long Way from Disney,” up the Amazon charts and wrote a helpful blog post based on his experience watching the Kindle rankings, which seem to differ from the regular book rankings. Read more about it on his blog.