In April, I signed up with Twitter. As a soon-to-be self-published-writer, I thought that I had to take advantage of any and all marketing tools. Especially the free ones. I’ve since made some interesting connections and no longer think of it as just a marketing tool. But, it is a good one.
As I cook my way through the recipes for the upcoming Passover book, I tweet about it. Just little notes (under 140 characters) letting people know what I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll ask for some input (ie: Matzo Balls – Floaters or Sinkers?), sometimes I’ll complain about a failed attempt (ie: today there was a power failure while I was baking a pie crust — the oven and timer timer shut off — will have to try that one again.)
My account is set up so that whatever I tweet then gets posted on Facebook as my new status. So an interesting thing happened last week. I got a phone call from a CBC radio producer that I know and she asked me if I’d talk about my summer of cooking on the radio. She’s been reading my cooking updates all summer and thought it would be a good segment. Sounds a little like some other blog/movie that’s been getting a lot of press about a writer cooking her way through a book.
I’ve done a bit of radio and TV since my first book came out. And I feel more comfortable doing it now, but there’s still a bit of nerves each time. I think I overcompensate by talking a mile-a-minute. Have you ever listened to an interview and been annoyed because the interviewee didn’t answer a direct question? I have. But then I realized that when I do these interviews, I just ramble so much that by the time I’m done answering the question I have no idea of what the question actually was.
I don’t fully know what I said during the interview — but vaguely recall that I talked about my books and cooking. My mother was happy that something I said made the interviewer laugh. Many people who heard the segment contacted me to tell me they enjoyed it. So in the end, we decided it was a success.
