Twitter’s New Design Isn’t Going to Be Great for Book Marketing

If you’re in the Twitter bookspace at all, you know that authors like to post their book covers. A lot. Twitter is going to have an upgrade and it’s changing the way images are displayed. Instead of variable sizes of images, there is going to be one main size – which isn’t conducive to book covers.

Here’s an example from author Neal Asher’s Twitter account:

And here’s what it looks like in new Twitter. It’s taking a small image and blowing it up horizontally, which means old posts are not going to be rendered very well:

Currently, not everyone has access to the new Twitter. Some users will find this in their settings menu, while others will not:

Once you do, it’s possible to switch back to “Legacy” Twitter.

You can find the updated guidelines for Twitter images here. In short: posted images need to be 440×220. So authors are going to have to adapt once this goes into full effect, and post horizontal images with a smaller snapshot of the book cover, like SPR’s Lead Story Badges.

However, this is going to affect how SPR posts other images in the future, as it will everyone.