One of the things I love about the online writing community, is how supportive everyone is, promoting each other’s books, blogs and anything else that needs a bit of publicity. However, this bonhomie doesn’t extend to everyone and there are a few writers whose work I regularly re-tweet or otherwise endorse, who rarely (if ever) reciprocate.

But that’s okay, cos it’s nice to be nice. And that was my solid opinion. Until today. Because today, a blogger who I’ve subscribed to for months, and whose posts I always read, retweet and generally put the word out about, blocked me on Twitter. And I thought WTF?

Now okay, I don’t expect the whole planet to love everything I do – it’s the old horses for courses thing and that’s fine, but (and I know I’m repeating myself here), WTF?

Okay, rant over. So here are my universal tactics vis-a-vis being nice on the old Twitteroonie-sphere:

If someone re-tweets me, I retweet them (having first checked they’re not a Porn King, Terrorist, Trump Supporter or an otherwise stupid person).

If someone follows one of my blogs, I check out theirs and follow/comment/tweet as appropriate.

If I like what someone has to say, even if we don’t follow each other, I’ll happily retweet. Sharing is good.

If I follow someone and they send me an automatic DM urging me to check out a link or whatever, I ignore them. I like the traditional approach, you know – you write a message to me and I reply. That sort of thing.

If someone follows me, I look at their profile. If they’re one of the Nice People who share stuff and reciprocate, that’s fine. If they only tweet their own crap, I ain’t interested bro.

Now, even though I’m exceptionally Nice, I’m not going to thank every single person who takes time to retweet my stuff – I’d be on Twitter all damn day! I say thank you by following/retweeting etc. And sometimes I’ll say thank you by knocking up an image on Photoshop with a link etc that promotes the work of the person concerned. But again, I’m not doing that for everyone, so if I retweet you, that’s me saying ‘Ta mate!’

Right, now I’ve got that off my chest, I’m going to go back to that novel I’m supposed to be writing…