Author - How well are your book sales doing?

Do you simply wait for the Amazon check or bank transfers of royalties to arrive in your account?
Perhaps you eagerly check each day your Amazon KDP reports page at https://kdp.amazon.com/reports

Both of the above will tell you how much money you've made but they won't tell you much about the number of each book you've sold. They won't tell you anything about your book sales at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo or elsewhere.

So where do you go to get book sales information?

If you want Amazon information for the last  six weeks+ try the link highlighted on  https://kdp.amazon.com/reports

According to Amazon the Prior six weeks' Royalties is changing soon to a sales dashboard covering the last 90 days. Amazon say you'll be able to:

Under Units Ordered on the dashboard, you'll see a graph showing Paid Units, Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) Read (through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners' Lending Library for KDP Select-enrolled titles) and Free Units. You can filter the graph by Title, Marketplace, and Timeframe. Below the graph, you'll see a Royalties Earned table. This allows you to see your royalties for all marketplaces in the time period you select. The royalty amounts shown are updated only after orders have been finalized, which can be hours or days after the order has been placed. To see a detailed "Sales & Royalty Report," click "Generate Report." This report includes units sold, refunds, and royalties (excluding KOLL royalties) earned during your selected timeframe. 

If you want results for a particular month then use the links at the right to get reports for individual months. These reports go way back - in my case to 2010. They'll tell you:

• What titles have sold on what days
• What your royalty rate is
• What the delivery charge was
• How much you earned for that book each day.

It's worthwhile keeping a record of daily sales and comparing that with promotions run on a particular day. That allows you to see if a promotion was cost effective.

Amazon are not the only book retailer though

If you want results from others, similar information is available. I use Smashwords to distribute to iBooks, B&N, Kobo and others. I can get details of my sales reports by using the links at the left of my 'Dashboard' there.

The daily sales link gives you a good overview of what has sold at each retailer but if you want a spreadsheet style display with details of individual books then use the 'Per-Payment Sales Report Generator' link to get a csv file.

What about other sources of information?

Try Novel Rank It will track sales of all books you register with it and provide informative charts. Unfortunately it only tracks paid sales. Free books don't count.

Kindle Nation Daily also have a page which tracks ebooks at http://tracker.kindlenationdaily.com/

This site tracks on an hourly basis as well as over 30 days and previous months so it's graphs are very useful to check the progress of promotions. Again you'll need to register the books you want to track - and it will track the rank of free books. If you are a reader (most successful authors are) then it will also send you an email alert if a particular ebook is offered free or on sale.

If this post has helped or entertained, will you help me? Download a FREE copy of the book 'Immortality Gene' from http://smarturl.it/avi or 'Raging Storm' at http://smarturl.it/botr Even if you never read them (but I hope you will) - it will help rankings. As to this post - it's part of a forthcoming book 'An Illustrated Guide to Getting Published.' In it, you'll learn all sorts of book promotion tricks.

Author—How easy is it to find your book/s?

Try an experiment. Go to an incognito browser window and type in the title of your book. You'll have to use an incognito window to make sure your previous searches don't influence your results. See what happens. Here's my result for searching for my book 'Immortality Gene' at Google:

As you can see the first reference to it was the top entry of page three of the search results. It's a book at Google Play and the book title and a page mentioning 'Immortality Gene' show up first.
A Goodreads entry showed up as the ninth entry on the same page, Page four of the results listed it as the first entry and finally the fifth entry featuring our website:

Those results aren't too bad - they are about on par with another book which appeared in the top 10 free ebooks with us in 2015 (Sycamore by Craig A. Falconer - good book). The result is a lot better than 'Breakers' by Edward W Robinson which was number 6 at Amazon when we were number 7.

My result pales into insignificance when compared with 'Season of the Harvest' by Michael R. Hicks(another good book). That is brought up as number 1, 2, 3, 6 and 8 on the first page of search results.

So what is Michael doing that I wasn't doing? Could it be the length of the title?
If I type in the series also - A Vested Interest Immortality Gene' I find myself as number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of the first page of search results. OK that's pretty good but who is going to enter the book series also in a search? I needed to do some SEO - Search Engine Optimisation to bring my 'Immortality Gene' references to the first page of search results.
One thing that showed up immediately was that Goodreads Reviews were given a high priority by Google.

Make sure your book is reviewed at Goodreads. BUT never sign in to Goodreads using your Facebook account! If you do then Amazon is likely to link the two and may reject reviews from some of your friends on Facebook and that won't help your sales.

Next Google seems to give preference to it's own services - Google Play books, Blogspot, YouTube Google+. Of course this post at Blogspot, which mentions 'Immortality Gene' in the text and in the post labels, should help.

Make sure you use Google services to mention your book. Put it in your blog and make a YouTube video. If your book isn't on Google Play books - publish it there.
Here's the YouTube video I made for Immortality Gene

Warning - technical stuff ahead

Next, your website. Do entry pages have the title of your book near the start of the text? Do your search terms feature in a heading? Are they mentioned in the meta tags under keywords and in the meta description? Are there links to the entry web page from other sites, including your blog, Facebook page, YouTube page and other social media pages? Do you have links from your author account at Amazon to your web page and blogs? Does the page name and URL contain your search term? This is all basic SEO stuff. Make sure it's done but beware of going over the top with it and 'keyword stuffing' your web pages—that can lose you ranking at Google. If you don't have a clue how this is done, find the top ranking pages for your search term and look at the source code to see if they've done anything special. Usually the fourth one on the first page returned is good to examine  because 1-3 may be paid ranking—watch for the 'Ad' in the returns and DON'T choose those pages to examine -

Here's what I picked out from looking at the top returns — The page newatlas.com/hydra-imortality-gene-foxo-kiel-university/25371/ featured these items. I've highlighted the relevant parts in red:

• 'immortality-gene' as part of the URL
• In the page's meta tags the page title was 'Hydra's immortality gene sheds light on human aging.
• The page also had Open Graph protocol 'og' meta tags in which 'Immortality Gene' appeared in the og:title meta tag and also the og:url meta tag. OG protocol is used by sites such as Facebook.
• The page had Twitter meta tags.
• The page was duplicated elsewhere on the web and had 'link rel="canonical"' tags
• The page headline was 'Hydra's immortality gene'
• A script featured the same headline
• The page featured a gallery of images which had a title containing 'immortality gene'
• the word 'immortality' occurred 14 times in the page and 'gene' occurred 31 times.

Learn what is involved in adding OG protocol items to your page and make use of it. These meta tags ensure that when a page is shared on Facebook the correct image is shown. Find out how to use them here. See how I used them below (#5).

Learn how to use Twitter cards - the Twitter meta tags - to your pages. You can find out how  here. See how I used them below (#4).

Make sure your page has images and add titles and descriptions to them. See what I did #8 below.

Can you program in Script? If so write some code which features your book title. This can be invisible to the user but should be functional. In my case I added a script type="application/ld+json" which you can find more details about here. See how I used a script below (#7).

Duplicate the page elsewhere on the web and add 'link rel="canonical"' tags. This will ensure all the pages count as one page at Google and you won't lose search engine ranking. More details here.


I can't claim to be the world's greatest expert at SEO but the changes I made to get my page ranking higher in Google were:

1. Change the page URL from 'immortality' to immortality-gene. It's now at http://avestedinterest.info/immortality-gene.htm
2. Adding the red section to the page title:
    A Vested Interest - Immortality Gene: If humans were immortal… 
3. Changing the page headline from 'If Humans were immortal…' to
   'If Humans had the Immortality Gene ...'
4. Adding the following Twitter meta tags:<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
   <meta name="twitter:site" content="@JChapman1729" />
   <meta name="twitter:title" content="A Vested Interest - Immortality Gene: If humans were immortal…" />
   <meta name="twitter:description" content="Science is on the verge of dramatically extending human lifespan. Will there be objections?" />
   <meta name="twitter:image" content= "http://avestedinterest.info/images/120YearsMax533x300.jpg" />
   <meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="If science activates the human immortality gene will there be objections?" />
5. Adding the following meta OG tags:
   <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
   <meta property="og:image" content="http://avestedinterest.info/images/120YearsMax533x300.jpg"/>
   <meta property="og:title" content="A Vested Interest - Immortality Gene: If humans were immortal…" />
   <meta property="og:description" content="Science is on the verge of dramatically extending human lifespan. Will there be objections?" />
   <meta property="og:url" content="http://avestedinterest.info/immortality-gene.htm"/>
6. I left the original page as it was and it was already duplicated in a blog. I added the following link rel="canonical" tags:
   <link rel="canonical" href="http://avestedinterest.info/immortality.htm">
   <link rel="canonical" href="http://avestedinterest.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/if-humans-were-immortal.html">
7.  I added the following script to the page header. If you want to use it yourself, change the green areas to your own choices. Put the entire script in front of your web pages </head> tag:
   <script type="application/ld+json">
   {
      "@context": "http://schema.org",
       "@type": "Article",
       "author": {
           "@type": "Person",
           "description": "A technophile author with a strong background in information technology, John is passionately drawn to explaining things and has a deep interest in environmental technology and genetic engineering. When not indulging his passion for reading and writing, he can be found designing space elevators, pondering the Immortality Gene and wandering around in hidden places. He lives in Northumberland, England.",
           "image": {
               "@type": "ImageObject",
               "url": "http://avestedinterest.info/images/John80.jpg"
           },
           "name": "John Chapman",
           "url": "http://avestedinterest.info/jc.htm"
       },
       "dateModified": "2017-01-24T023:44",
       "datePublished": "2017-01-24T023:44",
       "description": "Science is on the verge of dramatically extending human lifespan. Will there be objections?",
       "headline": "If Humans had the Immortality Gene …",
       "image": {
           "@type": "ImageObject",
           "caption": "If science activates the human immortality gene will there be objections?",          "height": "300 px",
           "url": "http://avestedinterest.info/images/120YearsMax533x300.jpg",
           "width": "533 px"
       },
       "mainEntityOfPage": "http://avestedinterest.info/immortality-gene.htm",
       "publisher": {
           "@type": "Organization",
           "logo": {
               "@type": "ImageObject",
               "url": "http://jaydax.co.uk/images/jaydaxbuttonlogo.jpg"
           },
           "name": "JayDax",
           "sameAs": [
               "http://avestedinterest.info",
               "https://www.facebook.com/A.Vested.Interest/",
               "https://twitter.com/JChapman1729",
               "https://uk.pinterest.com/johnchapman/"
           ],
           "url": "http://jaydax.co.uk/"
       }
   }
   </script>
8. I added a missing 'alt' statement to the image making it's code now :
   <img src="images/120YearsMax533x300.jpg" alt="Science is on the verge of activating a human immortality gene. Will there be objections?" width="533" height="300" class="right" />
9. I followed Google's recommendations for making my blogs discoverable by search engines. See their instructions here. 

I'm not quite finished. I still need to check Michael's keywords and description are for his 'Season of the Harvest' to see if  I can learn anything from them. How to steal those is the subject of another blog though. My web page has been fixed though and now all I have to do is wait to see if it's rank improves.

If this post has helped or entertained, will you help me? Download a FREE copy of our book 'Immortality Gene' from http://smarturl.it/avi Even if you never read it (but I hope you will) - it will help my rankings. As to this post - it's part of a forthcoming book 'An Illustrated Guide to Getting Published.'

Author - Who do you think you are?

In case you are wondering this is not a post about a genealogy program on TV; instead it's about author identities.

Your author name is your brand and it should be prominent on your books, your website, your blog and in your social media posts.

Why? Let me explain.
Let's suppose you've been hiding in a cave for the last 20 years and come across an awesome book called 'The Green Mile' by some author you've never heard of - Stephen King. You want more of his books so you go searching for them. What do you look up 'The Green Mile' or 'Stephen King'?
Of course you look up 'Stephen King' because his next books won't be called 'The Green Mile'.

If you go looking on Internet for Stephen King at Amazon you'll see:

Notice that his name is the most prominent text on each book?
Many new authors make the mistake of making their titles the most prominent text.

• Search for thegreenmile.com and you find the domain is nothing to do with King
• Search Facebook and you'll find lots of unofficial pages only apart from those for the film
• Search Twitter for @TheGreenMile and you get a page for Joseph Stewart-Paul who took the name in 2009 and hasn't tweeted yet.

If on the other hand you search for Stephen King you'll find:

• He has a website http://stephenking.com/
• He has a Facebook page - the checkmark next to his name confirms it's 'the' Stephen King
  
• He has a twitter page https://twitter.com/StephenKing. Again the checkmark tells you this is 'the' Stephen King.
  

But what if I want to use a pen name?

Ask yourself 'why?' 

• Are you ashamed of your name—is it 'Imani Diot' or  'Adolph Hittler'?
• Is your name already made famous by some celebrity? Why not make use of this?
• Are you publishing something you are ashamed of?
• Are you publishing something that might influence opinions in the wrong way? Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story in the style of a chemistry thesis. 'The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline.' He asked for it to be published under a pen name since he was due to attend his final chemistry doctorate interview and feared it might adversely influence the panel's decision. To his horror it went out under his own name and was widely circulated. At his final interview for his doctorate it wasn't mentioned until the last question, "Now Doctor Asomov what can you tell us about The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline?"

Despite the lack of need for pen names some authors have used them:

• Isaac Asimov: Paul French.
• J.K. Rowling: Robert Galbraith. ...
• Michael Crichton: John Lange, Jeffery Hudson and Michael Douglas. ...
• Stephen King: Richard Bachman.
• Charles Dodgson: Lewis Carroll
• Samuel L. Clemens: Mark Twain
• François-Marie Arouet: Voltaire
• Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot

Each had a good reason for writing under a pen name but in general - stick to your own name since it makes tax so much easier if your novels take off.

Are you getting affiliate fees on your royalties?

If you are selling books at Amazon you are probably getting a 35% or 70% royalty on your sales. If you sell those books at Smashwords your royalty will probably be 70.5%. You could be getting 39 - 43.5% or 74 - 78.5% at Amazon though and vastly increased sales at Smashwords. The trick is to take advantage of affiliate payments which can offer you anything from 4% to 70% of the price of an e-book.

Let's deal with the better known (but less profitable) one first:

Amazon 'associates' (affiliates)

You must have a web presence acceptable to Amazon to be accepted as an affiliate. By a 'web presence' that means a website or blog with substantial traffic. You'll probably need to register for affiliate accounts at .com, .co.uk, .ca etc. Australia doesn't seem to offer affiliate services. This means you'll get multiple affiliate tags making setting up links tricky (but not impossible). Amazon's affiliate agreement is a model of obscurity and makes it difficult to understand if a .com affiliate link used by a .co.uk customer will earn an affiliate payment. You can get affiliate payments for virtually all Amazon products other than free products. Amazon depreciate adding affiliate tags to free e-books and warn that doing so may cost you all your affiliate fees if you exceed 80% of links being to free products AND 20,000 free products are ordered using one of your links - unlikely for most people. You won't earn anything on your links to free products but if a customer goes on to view and purchase other items at Amazon, you'll get affiliate payments for those.
Fees are listed at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating/advertisingfees
At a minimum, assuming you make less than six affiliate sales per month you'll get 4% for e-books and other digital products
$0.99 - 4¢
$2.99 - 12¢
$3.99 - 16¢
Fees rise to up to 8.5% for 3,131 affiliate sales per month. If you managed to sell 3,131 99¢ ebooks in a month you would earn $263.47 from those sales.
Payments are made 60 days after the end of each month and can be by direct bank deposit, check or gift certificate. Affiliate payments are taken from Amazon't share of the purchase price, not the author's.
Amazon provide a toolbar for affiliates which allows you to quickly generate links and promote to social media.
Download series book 1, Immortality Gene, FREE now

Smashwords affiliate fees

Smashwords offers affiliate payments of 11% to 80.5% of the retail price of e-books. The actual percentage offered is determined by the author. The default is 11%. Anyone age 18+ with a Smashwords account is eligable to enroll.
Smashwords encourages the use of affiliate tags on free e-books and the author's own e-book links. You won't earn anything on those e-books but if a customer goes on to view and purchase other items at Smashwords, you'll get affiliate payments for those.
Affiliate fees come from the author's royalties. The author can choose not to offer affiliate payments. If an author elects to not offer an affiliate program for a book then the author's royalty is 85%.
Affiliate links are easy to create. My preferred method is to append the ?ref=[yourScreenName] code to links where [yourScreenName] is the bit after https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ on your 'My Smashwords page' at https://www.smashwords.com/profile
Assuming you make those 3,131 affiliate sales of an 11% 99¢ ebook you would earn $340.97 at Smashwords.
Smashwords affiliate agreement is much easier to understand than Amazon's Check it out at https://www.smashwords.com/about/smashwords_affiliate_documentation

Want to earn at Smashwords? All my e-books there offer a 35% royalty. They are visible at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JChapman/authors#published?ref=JChapman If you want to use that link then just replace the 'JChapman' at the end with your screen name. If you manage to sell Amazon's 3,131 books we'll both earn  a minimum of $3,298.51

Attention Authors - Check out something new - MineEye offers 100% royalties

This seems such a good deal for authors and musicians. MineEye is very new and offers to act as a retail outlet and to promote your e-books and music. It's a concept which deserves to work - time will tell.

Reposted from their blog at https://gongle22.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/attention-writers/

Attention Writers!

October 20, 2015MineEye, Voice Box LiveMineEye, self publishing, witers

Hello all you writer friends! I have great news for you! Robert, our Technical Director has sent the following information:

Momentous News – The Launch of MineEye.

Thirty Authors Needed !

For some while, you will know that we have had the vision of creating a community of writers, poets, musicians and artists in a strong web and social media network, capable of bringing together people from all over the world.

That community is called ‘MineEye’. We want to create a nurturing, positive and supportive environment for people to express themselves, develop and connect with their audience. Getting started as a writer is challenging enough personally without having to understand and engage with multi-national print publishing houses and online bookstores – mentioning no names !

This first phase is an online bookstore with a difference. This will allow writers to publish their books on our website for a small fee to cover our administrative costs. We will not charge percentage commissions from the sale of books on our site – ever. Whether an author sells 5 books or 10,000 books through MineEye, they get to keep every penny, every cent of their earnings.

Most importantly, our community of authors will be actively promoted by us. We have a wonderful, positive presence on social media and we have a powerful voice now – we are a force for good ! No longer will authors’ works be left languishing unknown and unread amongst literally millions of others in the catacombs of a multi-national company.

So now, with the MineEye website ready to launch, we need authors (and their books to sell) and customers to buy them. We will start small and understand that it will take many months to grow.

How can you help ? If you are a writer or you know someone that you can recommend, with a book ready to be published, we would love to hear from you. We went to attract our first “scribble of writers” – precisely 30 of you to start with.

To those 30, we will offer a free subscription for one year and will upload your book onto MineEye free of charge. You will receive 100% of your revenue from book sales. There are no strings, no hidden catches – we want to build our community.

Please note that this is an online bookstore where customers will buy and download your book, then send it to their Kindle or e-reader device. We cannot sell books in print because we don’t have a warehouse – yet ! Also, we ask that your book is complete in every respect – it needs to have been converted to an e-reader format before we can publish it and you will need great looking artwork, plus a few promotional paragraphs of text, so that we can help you sell your book.

We are really delighted to be ready to launch MineEye and look forward to getting our first wave of writers on board immediately ! Authors can sell their books online to customers today.

Please contact us by email at either: gavin@mineeye.co.uk or robert@mineeye.co.uk if you would like to talk to us about publishing your book on MineEye.

This is Gongle again! If you would like to have a look at the new site here is a link:http://www.mineeye.co.uk/

Love Gongle x

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Using a Twitter Collection to Promote

Twitter is great but that 140 characters limit is often an obstruction. There are ways to get round it though:

1. Use a graphic to include the extra text. Remember to get the aspect ratio of the graphic right. Twitter now resizes images to 455x227 pixels and will crop the height if it is more than twice the width. Here's an example:
   
   
2. Use one of a number of services which will split your text and post it as multiple tweets one after another.
3. Set up a Twitter Collection.

What is a Twitter Collection?

A Twitter Collection is a series of tweets grouped together by users. They may contain tweets by a single or multiple tweeps. Each collection has a name and description. New tweets can be added to it, each appearing at the top. For authors it's ideal for tweeting about a series. The collection can be retweeted as a whole or individually. Unlike normal tweets they appear in the order added rather than by date and time added - you can add an old tweet to the top of the list.

Here's part of an example:

Notice the collection has a title - 'The lighter side of promo' and a description - 'Can you use humor to…'. It also has a button at the left 'Tweet about this collection'.
Clicking the button gets you this:

This can be edited by the tweep or the default message tweeted as follows:

(If you want to see the actual collection it's at https://twitter.com/JChapman1729/timelines/655017052357439488 )

How can authors use this?

• You can link together a number of tweets with a common theme - in the example - humor. 
• If a discussion evolves from a tweet the posts could be placed in a collection. 
• You could also use this to promote a number of books in a series.  
• It's also possible for a number of authors to create Collections about a common genre. This has great potential. I'm still working out how this would work but my initial idea is as follows

A Tweet Collection Team

Promotion sites such as Bookbub owe their success to their genre specific emails. It might be possible to set up a Twitter Collection Group to do the same thing on Twitter. Tweeps would find this attractive because they see the posts of the genre collection they are interested in and following.

How it would work - Let's suppose you are a romance author but don't write erotica.

1. You write a tweet for your book and create an optional image for it 455 x 227 pixels in size. You post that tweet as normal in your timeline and get the URL of the tweet by clicking 'Details'
2. You go to the Facebook group for Romance (no erotica) and post the link to the tweet as is normally done for retweet groups.
3. You click the group's pinned Twitter Collection tweet and retweet that on Twitter. You undertake to do step 3 on a daily basis until you no longer want to be involved and have deleted the Facebook message you made in step 2
4. IF you need to make a change to your tweet DON'T edit it. Delete it from the Facebook comment and make it again (Don't do that too often!) You are only allowed ONE comment/tweet in the collection

That's it - you don't have to retweet the individual tweets of group members because they will all be in the collection!

On a daily basis the group moderator/s will:

• Delete the bottom two tweets and re-post them to the top of the collection
• Add any new tweets to the collection
• Make a minor change to the group pinned tweet to allow it to be retweeted again.

Of course if you write erotic romance/ science fiction/ thrillers / paranormal / fantasy / children's books / whatever, you simply use the appropriate group. No group for your genre? Create it - you are the moderator. Don't forget you can add any tweet, not just your own. You could add some tweets from other authors in your genre to get things going.

Promote the collection - not the individual tweets

The pinned Twitter Collection tweet should have an appropriate image associated. Change it often and get the group involved in making new ones.

How do I make a Twitter Collection?

Twitter suggests using either Tweetdeck or Curator - both programs from Twitter. Tweetdeck is probably easier for most Twitter users to access.

If you don't have Tweetdeck, get it at tweetdeck.twitter.com It doesn't require installation but will need access to your Twitter account/s.

If you are new to Tweetdeck there's a beginner's guide to using it at Mashable.

Mashable doesn't mention the new additions to Tweetdeck. Clicking the '+' at the left allows you to add any of these:

There at the bottom you'll find 'Collections'. Click it.

At the top click the -

The'll be a short delay then a new column will appear in Tweetdeck. Give the collection a name and add a description.

Tweetdeck says you can 'Drag Tweets into this collection' - you can, but you'll have to click the tweet then drag its drag icon. If you have a lot of tweets, that can freeze your computer while it catches up. I find it's better to copy and paste the tweet URL into the bottom of the collection.

To get the tweet URL from a normal Twitter page click the 'Details' link and copy the URL. In Tweetdeck you can use the ellipsis to get a menu and click 'Add to collection'

How do I get the Collection link?

At the top right of the collection in Tweetdeck click the 'slider' controls to get a menu. Then click Share and choose one of the options. I like to add an image, so I choose 'Tweet about this timeline'.

Where can I get more details?

You must be a glutton for technical stuff but here you go - https://dev.twitter.com/rest/collections/about

If this post has helped or entertained, will you help me? Download a FREE copy of the book 'Immortality Gene' from http://smarturl.it/avi or 'Raging Storm' at http://smarturl.it/botr Even if you never read them (but I hope you will) - it will help rankings. As to this post - it's part of a forthcoming book 'An Illustrated Guide to Getting Published.' In it, you'll learn all sorts of book promotion tricks.

Getting a Twitter image URL

Ever wanted to get the URL of an image in Twitter so you can use it in a different tweet? In the past Twitter showed this but it's a little more difficult now. Here are two methods of getting it:
Method 1 - this works for any image on Twitter - even if it's not your image.
1. Look for the 'More' link at the bottom of the tweet

2. From the 'More' menu select 'Embed tweet'.

Method 2 - This also works for any tweet but if you have many followers, the tweet may be difficult to find. It's better if the tweet is one of yours.

1. You'll need an account at TweetDeck - https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

2. In your 'User' column scroll down to your tweet with the picture you want and you'll find the 'pic.twitter…' link there ready to copy and paste.

Method 3. By far the easiest method provided it is your tweet

Delete the tweet! Huh!

Use the menu icon to select 'Delete Tweet' (Don't panic - you are not going to delete it.)

Once you select that the complete text of the tweet will be shown including that elusive 'pic.twitter.com/...' link. You can now copy it and then click the 'Cancel' button.

Incidentally this method is great for collecting the entire text of a tweet for re-use. Sometimes Twitter will shorten a link in it but the text you copy will contain the full link.

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