Kindle turns five: independent women thrive in ebook bestseller charts | Books | The Guardian

"People ask me all the time how I did it, but the truth is that what worked in 2012 doesn't work quite so well now," she said. "Back then there were lots of forums where people chatted about books, but now they tend to be more people posting information and then moving on. At that time, I had nine followers on Twitter, so one of the first things I did was to build Twitter followers, from the followers of people I liked. You could do that then, because there was an auto followback function. So I followed all of the followers of Val McDermid, say, and managed to build up my followers that way ... I used social media pretty much exclusively to do my marketing, and each time I came out with a new book, things had changed. But it was all about trying to get the books noticed."