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| Original photo by USFW |
The hivemind is filtered by the symbol #, also known as a hashtag (or octothorp if you're a writing nerd) and with it you can both broadcast to a specific group (#novel) or narrow your focus to a limited audience (#SoCal). It's also a tool to indicate an emotion or opinion, usually at the end of your text (#tmi #IDontWana #EndRant). Hashtags cannot contain any punctuation, but they're indifferent to capitalization.
So. As an author you'll find twitter is a great place to both find an audience and connect with a lot of other authors, readers, agents, publishers, and other industry pros. The best way to introduce yourself and meet like-minded people is to hunt down a twitter chat that is in your genre. Attend and participate, you'll find friendly people and more contests than you can shake a stick at.
I use twitter to connect with and follow some of my favorite authors. I announce new blog posts there, seek out people to interview for my newsletter, and let everyone know when I have a new book available. I'll pop in during the day to see how other people are doing, I frequently haunt the #amwriting tag to give encouragement or answer easy questions people run into during their drafting process.
Here's a list of sites that have already done a great job collecting all kinds of writing related hashtags.
And a list of twitter chats:
Finally, a website I use to figure out popular hashtags that are related to the ones I already know about:
hashtagify
Find me on twitter under @tamiveldura and let's talk! I'm frequently involved with #wschat and #genrechat.
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