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Mobile Ebooks, Self-publishing, Digital Storytelling

Publish a Book With Your Literary Tweets

A free cover for your book

Have you ever thought of making an e-book with your literary tweets? If you still have doubts, consider this: you can easily do it yourself, you can do it without any costs, you can use the book as a promotional tool.

Below there are tips based on my personal experience. Just make sure you’ve got a large coffee ready – and make your book happen!

How to collect a content?

Twitter search is currently showing results from 9 recent days. Nobody will find your fantastic tweet, if it’s 10 days old. 10 days means  “gone”.

It might be difficult even for yourself to collect your own Twitter stream. And here is a rescue: Tweetbook. It’s a wonderful web service, where you can make a pdf or xml file with your tweets (up to 3200). Having all of them in one editable document will make it really easy to select the golden ones – those you want in your book.

Tip: if you want to have a constant access to your tweets, you can subscribe to your Twitter profile’s feed. From now on all the updates will be collected in your RSS reader.

Where to publish?

There are a few really wonderful sites, where authors can self-publish, naming only Smashwords or Manybooks. Feedbooks is my favourite one. Here is why:

:. creating a book is extremely easy. Just copy and paste a piece of text into blog-like fields. A very useful feature is the ability to structure a book on different levels: parts, chapters, sections. If you do so, the table of content is clickable afterwards, what makes it easy to navigate through the book. This is a unique feature, I didn’t find it anywhere else

:. Feedbooks fully supports mobile reading. Major formats are ePub and mobi, what makes a book friendly for reading on cellphones and eReaders. Having in mind that Twitter is being consumed mostly from mobile Internet, it’s good to be there

:. apart from public domain books, there is a quickly growing section of original self-published books. Recently a new book list has started, 140 characters, with Twitter-based fiction. Just make sure you include “Twitter” as a tag for your book, and you’ll surely find yourself on the list.

What about a cover?

For many authors book cover seems to be a killing problem. They can’t design it themselves, they don’t know any designer, who would do it for free, they’re afraid to ask. Well, there are at least three ways to deal with that:

:. every site for self-publishers shows a default cover. At Feedbooks there is additionally a title and author’s name shown on a cover, which is a really nice feature

:. you can choose from a collection of free covers I’ve prepared for self-published Twitter authors like myself

:. as soon as you have a selection of tweets made, you can use a brilliant Wordle word cloud generator to make a cover for you. Read here how to do that.

How to benefit from a book?

As soon as your book is published, you can use it for promotional activities:

:. in addition to your current literary tweets, you can send from time to time a link to your book

:. show a book on your blog, you’re a published author, let everybody know it

:. share your book on other platforms, let it appear in as many places as possible. It’s a finished and lasting work, link to it from your profile on Posterous, Bebo, LiveJournal, even if you don’t use them frequently

:. if you want to try reaching a book agent or a publisher, having a published book is an asset. Sending an e-mail with a book attached (f.e. in pdf format) makes it more probable to draw attention

:. your book is at the same time an easily accessible archive of your best tweets. Send them again, from time to time, there might be people who didn’t discovered yet how good you are.

Note: if you’ve found this post useful, I would be grateful if you could just download my Twitter-fiction book, share it with your friends and leave a comment.