Among the most common concerns I hear from authors is how Twitter has proven to be a fruitless effort in promoting and selling their books. Their tweets are lost in the crowd of thousands of others, authors say, and they get the feeling that their posts are ignored. After all, as one admitted, “I’m deluged all day with tweets and ignore almost all of them myself!”

At the same time, so many people read tweets that not utilizing the service would be a missed opportunity to connect with potential readers, they add (and if they don’t, as I always remind them). So the challenge is how to make your tweets stand out.

Major magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly, may have just answered that question. They’ve recently started posting photos with their tweets. Many of them have reported increased retweets and more hits on the article that the tweeted photo links to compared to tweets when no photo is used.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be one of the big guys to tweet a photo. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to do.

Usually Twitter will simply pull the pic from your blog entry or wherever you’re linking from. Because of that, you’ll always want to post a pic with your blog or article. Make sure it’s at least 150 KB in size and generally square in the shape of other pics you’ve seen on Twitter posts. If there is no link, there’s an option to attach a photo with the post.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.