We’ve all heard the advice – Build your platform and they will come. So thousands of writers out there are busy blogging, tweeting, facebooking, instagramming etc. in the hope that it will all drive up their book sales. Does it actually work? I’m yet to be convinced but still adhere to the old adage “It’s better to have it and not need it that to need it and not have it.”

So how do you save any time for writing if you are busy trying to build your platform.

One tool I have discussed previously is TWEEPI.

The more I use it, the better I get at it. I now have over 9000 followers on Twitter.

Of course, any fool can get 9000 followers. Just follow your maximum per day, followback anyone who follows you etc. But I have 9000 followers and I’d bet my Amazon royalty checks that the majority of them are within my niche.



The first thing you need to do is figure out what your niche is – for writers that depends on what they write about and to whom they want to target their work. KNOW YOUR DEMOGRAPHIC.

In my particular case, I write about dogs. And I write tutorials for Spanish speakers who want to learn English.

A pretty wide market niche. I should probably have opened separate Twitter accounts for these two different niches but that didn’t occur to me until it was too late. Maybe sometime in the future I will break off and concentrate one account on the Spanish market. For now, they are integrated.

I use TWEEPI to target followers from other users that have had success in my niche.

I also use an android app called “Unfollowers’ to purge my account daily of those people who don’t followback.

At first I used TWEEPI in the recommended fashion. I bulk followed the maximum number of users per day. My current goal has been refined. I try to get 100 new followers every day. But I no longer follow in bulk. How does a person with 3 followers and who hasn’t tweeted in a month help my goal? He / She doesn’t. I am looking for active users in one of my niches. And people with hundreds or thousands of followers are the best choice.

I also avoid users that follow everyone regardless of niche. How is a plumbing supply company in Pittsburgh going to help me sell books? Even if they happen to follow the ‘I Love Dogs’ account?

After I use TWEEPI and Unfollowers to purge my account of unfollowers, I go to the ‘FOLLOW FOLLOWERS’ section. After you plug in the user name of the account you want to mine (that identifier that starts with @) the view will be something like this.



Here you can see a lot of info about the users you want to follow. Where are they from, how many followers they have, the account name and when was the last time they tweeted. My criteria is my own as to who I pick and don’t pick but I tend to stay away from anything other than the English alphabet and languages I don’t understand, from people who rarely tweet and from folks who don’t have many followers. Under 50? Not for me. Of course there are exceptions. If they have a dog in their icon foto they get in. If they are from my hometown, they get in – etc.

So my big secret, which I will let out here once and only once is relative to targeting the niche.

Who is doing what you are doing? In my case, writing books on dogs. So find those people. Follow their followers. Easy as that. There are also avid readers, book tweeters, book reviewers and others related to the book and Indie book world. I follow those people. I could follow a ton of other Self Pub INDIE writers but how will that help? I don’t want to follow my competition, I want to steal their customers. (Ok, share … share their customer)

So get to know Tweepi. It will save you a ton of time and increase your followers and help build your platform.

I swear by it.

David Gordon Burke

Find my books here.