My social media presence sucks. I have no Twitter, my TikTok languishes, Facebook is a wasteland and my Instagram, the only account that I really ever update, lays dormant for weeks at a time.
And yet, for much of my professional career, I worked in social media or closely adjacent realms. I spent years working full-time as a content producer. I’ve built and consulted on numerous social media marketing strategies for big name brands, worked with more influencers than I can count, and personally (wo)manned the phone for accounts with millions of followers. So why, when it comes to building my own personal brand as an author, can’t I get my shit together? Why can’t I make my number go up?
The answer is simple: I don’t want to. I don’t want to do what it takes to build and maintain a large following because—for me personally—I don’t think it’s worth it.
Long before I became an author, I knew that social media wasn’t good for me. In a perfect world, I would also be a perfect person, one who didn’t experience jealousy, compare-despair, or panic at the perception of success scarcity, but this world isn’t perfect and neither am I. So if I spent a few minutes (or hours) of downtime scrolling, I’d always come away bummed, feeling like wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, was the wrong thing. Everyone else was having more fun than me. Everyone else had more friends than me. Everyone else worked harder than me. Everyone else was more successful than me. Everyone else was more loved than me.
Once I really zeroed in on my artistic goals—writing a book—social media created a neat, clean catch-22. If I decided to spend a weekend at home writing, logging on made feel like everyone else was out having fun. Surely, all my friends would soon forget about me, and I was doomed to die alone in a pile of half-finished manuscripts. If I spent a weekend having fun with friends, logging on made me feel like everyone else was seeing their hard work pay off and their dreams come true. Surely, I would never amount to anything, and I was doomed to die alone in a pile of half-finished manuscripts. It felt like there was no way to win.
My years of professionally working in social media had also taught me that I didn’t like what it did to my brain. I’m not a multitasker, and in general, am a very focused person. I like to start a task and finish it, but social media was like getting hit with buckshot, pulling my attention here, there and everywhere. Not only did interacting with social media make it hard to finish anything, it made it hard for me to decide what I should be working on in the first place. It pulled me out of whatever moment, groove, vibe I was in, and launched me into a frenetic, timeless space where I could hardly complete a text, much less a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter or, god forbid, a book.
And yet, even knowing all of this, I tried to make it work.
A few years ago, I decided I was going to get serious about my social media presence. My second book had just come out, the result of years of writing, and yet when it dropped into the world, it created barely a ripple in the plane of publishing. I had two more books on the horizon. I wanted them to do better, to make more of a mark, and I thought I was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen.
Drawing on everything I had used when I worked in social media for other people’s brands, I built myself a content calendar, and invested in a number of tech tools, like a scheduler to automate posts, ring lights and tripods, and a host of apps for everything from photo and video editing to automatically-generated captions. I also dove into the world of successful TikTokers who offered advice on how to become a successful TikToker, and internalized their rules, buoyed by their assurances that following said rules would result in 1000 followers in the first week.
I developed several different types of content I could create and made a schedule weeks in advance. I chose my niche and stuck to it, identifying TikTok trends that I could adapt to the world of writing. I sent up my ring ling and tripod, balancing them on a cardboard box and a stack of books to get the right height, and decorated a corner of my office so that it would be a bright and visually engaging background.
I soon found that the one full day a week I had planned to allocate for batch creating content (changing outfits, so that it didn’t all look the same), wasn’t really enough, and realistically I needed two. I only had four days a week to work when my son was in preschool, but I figured that devoting 50 percent of my time to social media wasn’t going to be something that I was going to have to do forever—just until I got my following up.
I had decided to focus most of my energy and attention on TikTok—since that was where it was supposed to be for writers. I took all of the TikTok advice to heart, and created short fast-paced, well-lit videos that were on trend and targeted to my niche. When I spoke, I did so quickly and energetically. I found and followed small and major #booktok accounts, and left comments and cute emojis on their posts, and I waited for the followers to roll in. And waited. And waited. It never happened. Instead, I frequently would spend two hours making a TikTok only to have it get barely a hundred views, all from people I already knew IRL.
I began to realize that it scheduling content more than a few days in advance wasn’t really realistic, and risked making me look out of touch—or worse, ignorant and insensitive—because my posts didn’t seem in tune with trends or current events. I needed to check in every day, and often create things on the fly if I wanted to keep up. Also, to truly build a following with an engaged audience, you can’t just post content—you have to interact. You have to like and respond to comments, and engage with other accounts, to keep the always changing algorithms from burying your posts in some metaphorical content dungeon where not even your mom sees them.
Actually, as I soon found out, you can do all of that, and more, and your posts will still end up in the dungeon. I didn’t get a thousand followers in a week. Nor did I get them in two, or three, or even four. Three months into trying to build my brand as I writer, and I had gained 500 followers on TikTok, and lost a whopping 30 on Instagram, where it seemed like every time I posted, people who’d forgotten about me were reminded to unfollow.
The worst part, though, was that I started to feel like a fake. I was doing all of this at a particularly hard time in my life. I was undergoing fertility treatments that didn’t work, my husband had his second major heart surgery in a little more than year, and this was all during a pandemic. When I go back and watch the TikToks I made during this time, I can see the disassociation between the person I was pretending to be—makeup done and cheerful while delivering pithy advice or self-deprecating takes—and the person I was at that time: exhausted, scared, desperate for a break and waging a daily war to keep depression at bay. And I wasn’t even writing. Trying to promote my books had left me little time to actually write them.
So one day, I quit. I deleted the posts that felt the least like me, put my accounts on private, and decided to not even look at them for the rest of the summer. I felt a difference immediately. My days spent writing felt less rushed, I was more relaxed, and I was undeniably happier. I was no longer adding extra little failures to my day by posting content that didn’t perform like I had hoped it would. I wasn’t tied to my phone, and I wasn’t looking at every minute of my life and wondering if I could somehow turn it into content. I had time to go for walks, to make lunch, to think, to write.
I don’t think I’m alone when it comes to writers who have internalized the idea that their success as an author is intrinsically tied to their ability to build a social media following. Publishing is a volatile, ever-changing and sometimes precarious-seeming world, and we’re all trying to figure out how to gain, and then not lose, a foothold in it. On the surface, social media is the obvious answer here. It is readily available, and monetarily, it is free. Everyone else is doing it, and we can see—because there’s always a number attached—that some of them are doing it quite well.
But it’s not really free. It comes with a price that I am no longer willing to pay. I know that I only have a finite amount of time and creative energy, and I want to funnel all of that into my books. I still fundamentally believe that the only true way to be a successful author is to write the best fucking books you can, and so that is what I choose to focus on. I’m also no longer willing to engage in activities that I know are harmful to my mental health. My accounts aren’t on private anymore, but I mute with abandon, don’t have any apps on my phone, and only post when I feel like I have something I truly want to share or say.
I’m not following the rules, I’m not participating in the conversation, and I’m not doing whatever it takes. For me as a brand, this feels risky. For me as a person, though, this feels right.
Newly agented writer here and this is music to my ears! I've been worrying so much on how much I should be present on social media but now I realize, I need to do what's right for me. And the truth is that will probably not much, as SM always takes a toll on my wellbeing. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I'm taking these to heart :)
Thank you for this. I went through a phase where I poured myself into social media, constantly, and when I had to take a break for a few months, I remember noticing that my sales rankings were still the same (and sometimes ??? better???) and thinking, “Why the fuck did I do all that?!” Nail in the coffin was when a close friend said she liked offline Becca so much more, because I was actually there and in the moment with her. I still use it but way more intentionally and I’m trying to ignore the little voice yelling in my head that my next book coming out is totally reliant on how many dumb tiktoks I make, because the actual numbers have shown me that’s just...not true. 😅 And I’m also so, so much happier and -- crazy concept -- have since written & sold more projects because I’m hardly on my phone and spend way more time actually writing! I do think publishers bear some guilt with this because I’ve had folks flat out ask when I’ll start posting more / get back on platforms I’ve chosen to leave / and it has been a weird exercise in boundary-setting to politely and firmly be like, “Actually, I won’t be doing that. I’m just going to continue doing the work that matters. The actual writing part.” Thank you for every word of this!