Tuesday 18 February 2014

The most read thing I've ever written...

...is a tweet.

Yep. Three and a half years on from my first publication, after short stories, narrative essays, a collection and a textbook, after endless wearying self-promotion and promotion and promotion... the most read thing I've ever written is a tweet. Potentially.

You see, I went to see David Baddiel's new show "Fame: not the musical" last week (it's excellent, by the way, so go and see it). Afterwards, I felt sufficiently impressed to write a review in 140 characters - a tweet review or, if you absolutely insist, a tweview. No, that's an awful contraction. Erase it from your minds.

Anyway, I wrote the tweet, namechecking @baddiel... and he retweeted it. And then some of his followers retweeted it too. Hell, some even favourited it (favourited: another word abomination). Add up all of Baddiel's Twitter followers, and those of the people who retweeted it, and mine... well, at the time I took the screenshot, this is what that looked like:

The retweets of my review of David Baddiel's "Fame: not the musical"
All it takes is a retweet from the right person

81 + 51 + 45 + 41 + 1,552 + 751 + 39 + 329,642, that's 332,202 people. Plus my 818. That's 333,020 Twitter users. A potential audience of a third of a million people...

Before you say it, I know they won't all have read it. For many (most?) it will be buried in their timeline. Others will scroll happily by. But even if one in a hundred stopped to read it, well... well, what, exactly? Three thousand people would then know what I thought about David Baddiel's (brilliant) new show.

So what?

I still haven't sold any books at all so far this month...