Adrift in Twitter Land

After all, Twitter is the place to be. I know people who have won Kindles, books, jewelry and other things on Twitter. I know! A Kindle? How, who, why, when? Free stuff is always a good thing, and I'm there. Authors are on Twitter, agents are on Twitter. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are on Twitter. So are millions of other people with less important names and nonexistent pedigrees.

I joined over a year ago for the express purpose of following some well-known authors. Then I decided to stalk some literary agents to gain insight on the machinations of the publishing business. I hung on for a couple of days, posting various stupid comments. It's extremely difficult to be witty in 140 characters. In no time at all, I fell off the Twitter wagon. I didn't get it. Things were spinning by way too fast, and I no longer have a BlackBerry, so I was tweeting from my computer. It's difficult to quickly reply if you're lugging one of those things around on your back.

Besides, there's Facebook if I want to chitchat with friends or keep track of my kids, and Facebook can be an enormously time-sucking venture all by itself. I've already got too many things to do on my plate, and not enough time to do them. So with absolutely no guilt, I abandoned Twitter about a week after I started.

I know I should have stuck it out with the other birds in the Twitter tree, but who has that much time?

Now I have a finished manuscript to peddle - I mean, pitch - and so it's back to stalking (I mean, researching) some agents. Twitter is huge among the literary crowd. Just about everyone who is anyone is tweeting these days. So it was with some trepidation that I decided to give tweeting one more try.

The tweeting clueless must formulate a plan of attack. The first thing on the agenda for full Twitter immersion is to find someone you know who will allow you to ride their coattails. It's very much like following the popular and funny around at a cocktail party. You trail after an amusing conversation and decide whether or not to get your feet wet by joining in. My cocktail party intro girl is the one who won the Kindle. She knows everything.

So I hopped into her sphere of influence and took a few of her followers and followees around for a spin. After you have established a few personalities that may interest you, the choices then are to follow or not. You can always stop following any person at any time. I don't think Twitter people take rejection as personally as they would on Facebook.

People - like agents and authors - post links to their blogs. I post links to my Blogcritics articles, my Associated Content page and my other blog posts. Twitter appears to be a lightning fast approach to gaining information. It's much faster than email.

Somewhere along the way, I gained a few followers. Why, I ask myself. If there were a prize to be given for the most boring tweeter on Twitter, I'm sure I would place in the top five.

After two weeks of dipping my toes into the fast-moving Twitter waters, I must say that I'm still relatively clueless. I'm still that wallflower at the cocktail party with drink in hand wondering which language I should speak.

It might be time to purchase Twitter for Dummies.