Sample Sunday

Here we go again. Sample Sunday is coming up again, surprisingly enough on Sunday, and I will be participating again with an excerpt from "Feallengod: The Conflict in the Heavenlies." I will be offering Chapter 8, which according to St. Celibart stats, is the most popular chapter outside of the penultimate, which is the coup de gras, and I'm not going to offer it to anyone who can't find St. Celibart. So there.

So here's the deal: Independent authors band together on Sample Sunday to Tweet using the hashtag #samplesunday. Each tweet includes a link that leads to an excerpt from one of the author's books. Twitterers who are involved follow the links, and if they like the excerpt, they retweet the original tweet. That way the author's work gets exposure to each re-twitterer's network of followers. I'm also using the hashtags #spiritual and #literaryfiction, so you can search with those to find me if you want. It seems like an effective way to use Twitter.

Speaking of which, I've figured out a couple of the chintzy ways of manipulating social media. First a disclaimer -- there's nothing new here. First, on Twitter I'll often use one of the top hashtags, so hip people will be forced to see my tweets. Of course, the activity around these hashtags is fast and furious, otherwise they wouldn't be at the top, so I'm probably just getting lost in the fray. And then there's Facebook, where I join appropriate groups and wait for them to post something. Then I'll comment and leave a link, which will show up on the news feed of everyone in that group. So I have to say I've got it all figured out.

BTW, I've sold one copy of "The Job" this month.