Cyberwellness Tips for Twitter

There’s an interview with William Gibson in the Wall Street Journal today where he mentions Twitter quite a bit, so I thought I’d take the excuse to dive in.
Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in a book that he wrote in the early ’80s—on a typewriter!—has a new novel out this week. In his chat with the WSJ, he says:

I’ve noticed two things. One is that I’m able to observe via Twitter the global launch of the book. I’m able to simultaneously see for the first time that the English language editions, which have been exported from England into Europe and Australia, are released a week and a half before they’re released to the rest of the world. [...] The other thing is the number of Twitter users asking me questions that I’m usually woefully unable to answer about formats and editions.

Actually, Gibson answers a lot of questions on Twitter. It’s remarkable to see him retweet them back out to his followers with micro-responses inline. In some sense, he’s making the WSJ superfluous: his Twitter account has become a permanent interview, unfolding day by day, question by question.
Gibson is also, in general, a big retweeter—an accelerator of novel ideas and images. Some have to do with his books; many more don’t. He’s built a super-engaged Twitter following not just by talking about his books, but by sharing the raw material that feeds them.
So if you’re interested in seeing a smart writer use Twitter to follow and accelerate the buzz around a big launch, you’ll want to follow along for the next few weeks as his tour begins.
But William Gibson is well-established. What about a journalist putting out her first book? That’s science writer Rebecca Skloot, who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—a book that’s hard to categorize and, perhaps, according to conventional wisdom, hard to sell. Skloot’s publisher wasn’t willing to pay for a book tour.
So she organized her own via Twitter and Facebook, asking followers and fans to suggest venues and arrange gigs. They did, and Skloot criss-crossed the country, tweeting her schedule as it came together in real-time along the way. Her book became a bestseller, and it’s now being made into an HBO movie. (And she’s still on tour, folks.)
So, these are two writers with very different characteristics:

• One writing fiction, with a big existing fan base;
• another writing non-fiction, just beginning to build a following.

Both are using Twitter to build and nurture their audiences. Follow both, and you’ll get a master class in modern book marketing. (The remarkable thing, of course, is that it doesn’t feel very much like marketing at all.)
More broadly, the Follow reader chat very Thursday has become a hub for conversation about the future of book publishing. It’s a good jumping-off point to find more people—not just writers but agents, editors, and booksellers—who are using Twitter effectively.
As William Gibson puts it:

After a few days on Twitter, what was most evident to me is that, if you set it up right, it’s probably the most powerful novelty aggregator that has ever existed.

And it’s not such a leap from novelty to novel.