Friday, June 4, 2010

An interesting twitter story

Tip of the day: Don't forget #kidlitchat happens on twitter Tuesday evenings (9pm EST, 6 pm PST) and #yalitchat happens on twitter Wednesday evenings (same time).

So, every once in awhile, I put in one of my book titles in the little search box that sits in the right-hand column of twitter. Because, come on, it's fun to see what people are saying about my books in 140 characters or less. Every Friday, I try to remember to share one of my favorite tweets from the week, because some of them are just fun!

But then, a funny thing happened this past week when I searched on my title. Someone tweeted to someone with "Edit" as a part of their twitter name, and one of my book titles was in the tweet. Only problem was, the rest of the tweet wasn't in English. I put the tweet into the handy dandy google translator and determined that the language was Portuguese, and the person had been asking the editor if they might consider publishing my book in Brazil. I looked up the company the editor was with and it looked like a good one, with some well-known books published by them.

Here's the funny thing. The past few weeks, I've gotten a few e-mails from readers in Brazil, wanting to know if they could have a copy of my book to read and review, because they've heard such good things about it. Apparently, Brazilians can order it from Amazon, and some have, but it's expensive. I told one person I'd do it, just because she was VERY convincing and told me she'd try and get it some good exposure, so it could perhaps be published over there. (Yes, this was a different person than the one tweeting the editor).

Anyway, I'm not very shy when it comes to twitter for some reason. So I tweeted a reply to the girl as well as the editor and said, "Brazilian rights are available..." The editor immediately tweeted back to me and asked who she should get in touch with about acquiring the rights. I told her to contact me through my web site and I'd provide more specific information.

We e-mailed back a few times, and then the next day, she told me she was talking to the sub-agent in Spain and things were off to a good start.

I don't know yet how the story ends, but even if nothing comes of it, I still think it's a cool story. One that does show the power of twitter!!

~Lisa, Miss Crafting a Career

5 comments:

C. K. Kelly Martin said...

Very cool, Lisa! Keeping my fingers crossed on that!

GM said...

That's awesome! Oh, the power of Twitter :o)

Kate Fall said...

Holy moley, Lisa, that is so cool! Good luck!

DeenaML said...

Love the power of twitter and of stalking your book titles! :)

Emily Marshall said...

Wow Lisa. What a cool story. I hope it works out for you.