I've a confession to make;  I'm not a world famous, best-selling, highly popular author.....at least not yet I'm not.

In fact I've been a self-published author for less than a year and I'm still working out what works and what doesn't, what advice is good advice and what is not etc.

Like most people I suspect I learn most from things I try myself and what works I repeat and what doesn't work I file under B*.

Take the George and the Dragon artwork competition I am currently running.  I've tried various ways to reach out and connect with people and let them know the competition exists.

If you've read anything about competition on this blog then you'll know the most prominent method I've used is Twitter.  I've currently got over 17,300 twitter followers. Not everyone of them is interested in me or what I tweet but they are the best chance I have of reaching and even bigger audience.

This is taken from Twitonomy, just one of a number of Twitter apps I use for free.  It shows one particular tweet about the competition that was retweeted 7 times and reached a further 86,952 Tweeterers.

Other than twitter I also tried to mail shot all of the schools in the UK.  Unfortunately this had two issues; firstly the list I used was out of date and I received a large number of bounce backs and secondly the list was so large it broke my Outlook.

Although as I have learnt in recent days some emails did get to some schools and have resulted in several pieces of artwork being submitted.

As we get closer to Halloween and the competition closing date I am hopefully I'll receive more and the judges will really have a task on their hands picking the winner.

So until we have to start deliberating I thought I'd leave you with just one on the entrants:

*for Bin! :)