Yesterday I had a fleeting moment of internet fame and turned into a giddy child. Why? Because Margaret Atwood mentioned Carve on Twitter!

It actually started two days ago, when I was lost in another one of my Twitter trances (I do this a lot) and found this tweet that Margaret Atwood had posted awhile back:

After reading the linked article, I got to thinking…is it true? Is social media just a waste of time for the self-published, and possibly by extension, small press lit mags? We’ve been trying to push our Premium Edition subscriptions through Twitter and Facebook and admittedly, haven’t had that much luck. So I was feeling pretty down about it.

Then I thought, Margaret Atwood has 340k followers, let’s try an experiment! So I retweeted her post with the article and then tweeted this: 

After that I signed off Twitter and called it a night. I figured if she retweeted us I’d get a push notification on my phone. Except I had no idea that for some reason my notifications were turned off. So she DID retweet us! And I missed it!

I didn’t find out until the next morning when I jumped on and saw that we had 19 mentions. Whoa! What? I thought I’d had a severe spam attack.

I scanned through them and quickly realized - O-M-G - Margaret Atwood tweeted us!

TWICE!

Unfortunately in that last one she misspelled our web address, but we’re not complaining. We still picked up 100+ new followers and now MARGARET ATWOOD KNOWS WHO WE ARE!

I spent the morning excitedly reading the RT’s and mentions and thanking Ms. Atwood by giving her a “Twitter hug.” She RT’d us and we picked up even MORE new followers!

Will those followers turn into subscribers? Maybe not (yet), but I also didn’t mind feeling like a Twitter celebrity for a fleeting moment. And the best part - Margaret Atwood follows Carve now!

Thanks, Margaret!

(And if you don’t know who Margaret Atwood is, please, go read her work.)