A local businessman’s new book has shot to the top of Amazon’s charts thanks to his use of social networking phenomenon Twitter.

John Richardson, a Bangor entrepreneur, built up his profile on the micro-blogging site ahead of the release of his book Dream On: One Hacker’s Challenge to Break Par in a Year.

The book is the story of the challenge Mr Richardson set himself to play a par round of golf within a year, a feat that meant taking 33 strokes off his typical weekend golf game.

His Twitter “followers” last week drove the book to number one on Amazon’s golf chart and into the overall top 500 on the book selling website.

Even though his publisher had not even begun the traditional media push for the book, Mr Richardson’s blog updates — or Tweets — ensured it quickly went out of stock on Amazon.

With a business and marketing degree and 15 years experience running coffee-bars and catering businesses, Mr Richardson saw more potential in utilising what used to be known as new media than having a launch event that would be “not much more than an ego session”.

“I became fascinated by the opportunity that Twitter offers for its users to interact with authors. In the past, if you read and enjoyed a book, it was almost impossible to contact the author to let him or her know. Twitter provides a way for authors and readers to interact in a very contained and interesting way,” he said.

Ahead of his book’s release Mr Richardson gave golf tips on his tweets as a way of interacting with other users. “You can’t come on and sell on Twitter, that’s not how it works. You have to be helpful and it has to be a two-way street,” he said.

“It is easy to look at it sceptically and ask where the money is in people tweeting about making a cup of tea. But there are strong communities on Twitter and it is a good way to get hold of people and improve a brand.”

Helen Wright, the author’s editor at Blackstaff Press, added: “We’ve known for some time that Twitter can be an enormously powerful tool, but John is the first of our authors (and we believe the first local author full stop) to have used it to such fantastic effect. The book only became available in the last week in May, and we’ve already had three substantial orders from Amazon.”

Mr Richardson currently works as a management consultant to coffee shop businesses across the UK and has written two other books — Wake Up and Smell the Profit: 52 Guaranteed Ways to Make More Money in Your Coffee Business and The Coffee Boys Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up and Managing Your Own Coffee Bar.

sross@belfasttelegraph.co.uk