I'll admit it. I'm a bit of a social media maniac. Why, Mitali, why? you might be asking. Let me share five sweet outcomes of my involvement with Twitter, moving from the sublime to the practical:
- Getting to know a slew of fabulous New England independent booksellers as well as local authors and illustrators via Kids Heart Authors Day, not to mention making a good buddy and colleague in Deborah Sloan, marketing maven. (Now Publisher's Weekly is hosting a National Bookstore Day, and I'm not beyond thinking that imitation is a form of flattery.)
- The chance to shift from a myopic stare at my own book promotion to a wider vision of connecting kids to many great stories via Twitter Book Parties.
- Editor Pradipta Sarkar of HarperCollins India found me on Twitter, and we chatted back and forth about my books via 140-character tweets. Now three of them are going to be published in India (the books, not the tweets.)
- Books galore, books a-plenty. For example, Jennifer Hart of Harper Perennial and Harper paperbacks discovered I was a big Betsy-Tacy fan via my tweets, so she sent me copies of their re-issues. I got them today:
- Several speaking gigs, like this one at the California School Library Association Convention on November 20, 2009 (notice that's just when I start to get the winter blues here in Boston), were fully arranged via Twitter.
