Come Join my Facebook Group
I've mentioned this in various places on social media, but I don't think I've announced on the blog that I officially launched my Facebook group last month. It's called The Help Desk, and it's a [Read More ...]
Social Media
Twitter Will lock Your Account If You Change the Display Name to “Elon Musk”
I just found a 100% effective way to cut back on my time wasted on Twitter. In what is very likely a response to scammers impersonating the South African billioniare, Twitter is now automatically [Read More ...]
How to Tell How Many Followers You Lost in the Great Twitter “Purge” of 2018
In what is being widely mis-characterized as a purge of fake users, earlier this week Twitter started removing "locked" accounts from the follower counts belonging to active user. According to [Read More ...]
Goodreads’s New Android App is Faster, Smaller, and Also Makes Julienne Fries
Following several weeks of public beta testing, Goodreads has launched a new Android app. Try the new Explore page, where you can browse books trending on Goodreads, new releases hot off the presses, [Read More ...]
Making Your Own Custom Facebook and Twitter Share Links/Buttons for Beginners
Share buttons for social media such as Facebook and Twitter are a great way to grow your audience organically and let your readers support your work by sharing it their social media networks. The [Read More ...]
Thirty Minutes a Day is All It Takes to Automate Your Social Media Activity, But I Don’t Recommend it
As I am sure you know, there aren't enough hours in the day to get all your work done. This is why we are always looking for new ways to automate tasks, and why I started the Tech Tools for Authors [Read More ...]
I’m Leaving Twitter
The problem with Twitter is that the folks who run the show don't understand their userbase or their product. We can see this in how Twitter's more useful features such as hashtags and quote retweets [Read More ...]
Tech Tools for Authors #4: Social Media
Authors have to juggle a lot of balls in today's book industry. Not only do they have to write that next book, they also have to market it, balance the ledgers, woo their fans on social media, do [Read More ...]
Infographic: Social Media Cheat Sheet
A picture is worth a thousand words, and nowhere is that more true than on social networks. This is why it is incredibly important that the media you use on social networks fit the standard sizes. [Read More ...]
Two-Thirds of Tweeted Links are Posted by Bots, and Other Not Terribly Useful info
If you ever wondered just how many links you see on Twitter were shared by a person, the answer is: not too damn many. We still don't know what impact they have, though. From Pew Research Center: In [Read More ...]
Twitter Changes Rules to Crack Down on Bots, Bans Mass Tweeting and Duplicate Accounts
A few weeks back Facebook and Twitter were humiliated by a NYTimes piece that detailed the back alley practices of the social media industry, and now the latter is finally doing something about the [Read More ...]
How to Delete Your Twitter Timeline (and Why You Should)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter is a great place to share jokes and engage in debate, but it is also accepted that one's Twitter timeline exists only to be weaponized by one's [Read More ...]
Tweet-Archiving Service Storify is Shutting Down
Launched in 2010, Storify was a service you could use to create a narrative by collecting tweets into a single web page. The service just announced it is going to shut down on 18 May, 2018. Thank [Read More ...]
Amazon Not Closing All Its Support Forums
When I reported my scoop last week that Amazon was closing its support forums, it looked like Amazon was going to simply abandon its customers to go find support on social networks and third-party [Read More ...]
Wattpad Now Pimping Writers to Hachette Romans
We all know that authors have been using Wattpad to refine their work before officially publishing it in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. This has been going on since at least 2011. Not all authors [Read More ...]