I started last year with one clear goal: 2024 was going to be the year that I finally did social media. Regular posting, a content calendar, a strategy, a plan for growth — all of that. And yet I ended the year pretty certain that I never wanted to open those apps again, let alone post my photos and words to them. How?
My main motivation for wanting to conquer my long-held ambivalence about posting was because I had a book coming out in April 2024. I was very anxious about this, in part because A Body Made of Glass was not an obviously easy sell. There are a few reasons for that: it blends several genres in a hard-to-categorise way, it tackles a subject in which I am not a well-known or previously published expert, and it is highly personal. It had also, in quite a modest way, done well according to the nebulous pre-publication benchmarks that authors obsess over. It had attracted a "Big Five" publisher in the US, something I had not had before, received a BBC radio serialisation deal in the UK, and had received some decent early reviews from industry publications in both places. I felt I should be leaving no stone unturned to support the book's success, since I had been gifted opportunities that many other writers would love to have. Chances, too, that I may never have again.
There are very few things that an author can practically do to make a book a success, especially after said book is written, edited and printed. Being a celebrity or personality with a pre-existing audience that adores you definitely helps, but isn't something you can suddenly decide to become four months before your publication date. Catching a particular trend or moment that causes publishers to invest heavily in promotion and booksellers to place large early orders is great too, but once the book is done that's up to them, not you. Giving off that nebulous aura of "I'm about to become a huge literary success" that seems to cling to some people and not others would be good as well, but is also pretty hard to engineer deliberately if that's not your personality or presentation (and it isn't mine).
In that tense, quiet period after the book has been finalised but before anyone can buy or read it, augmenting your personal brand via the regular use of social media feels like the only concrete action you can take. Or at least it did to me, so I threw myself into it. I attended some training sessions on "social media for authors". I asked professional acquaintances with expertise for tips. I learned that Instagram and TikTok were the best platforms to target for bookish followers and that the algorithms of these platforms were, these days, only interested in vertical videos. I compiled lists of videos I could make and started filming mostly-daily updates about my experience as an author with a book coming out soon. I scoured the accounts of other authors who were more successful than me on social media for insights. I posted about every tiny bit of publicity my book got or small win I achieved. I asked people to pre-order in as many ways as I could think of. I delved into the analytics, searching for ways to optimise and improve. I spent a lot of time scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, hunting for the "one weird trick" that would help me make a success of this.
I quickly began to feel quite uncomfortable. I'm not a natural on camera and I don't have that talent for talking effortlessly and engagingly to a lens when alone in a room that successful social media personalities need. I was forcing it all the time, making myself record multiple takes and doing things again and again until they looked "natural" (a highly unnatural behaviour). My video editing skills are basic, so turning out regular videos took me a long time. Worst of all, though, was the way in which this enterprise began to alter my mindset about the normal stuff of life. I never used to think very hard about what I wore for a casual day of writing at home, or worry about how clean the bathroom mirror was, or obsess over what narrative or story might emerge from my general jumble of accumulated tasks. It shocked me how quickly I started viewing my own life as something to film and share, rather than something to just... live. I've seen this effect described as "the devil had taken my eyes" and I feel that is accurate. Something had taken over my gaze and it wasn't something good. A new and sinister lens had appeared between me and the world. One evening, as I made my husband walk our dog past the same scenic view multiple times so that I could get the best shot of it for a video, I experienced a sudden wave of revulsion for myself and what I was doing. From then on, I began to despise the way this supposedly necessary aspect of modern authorship was intruding on parts of me that I had never meant to be available for public consumption.
Worst of all, perhaps, it didn't even seem to be doing anything. The TikTok and Instagram algorithms were utterly disinterested in what I was posting. Some of my existing followers saw my videos and interacted with them, but the promise that this kind of regular video posting would expose my work to lots of new potential readers was never fulfilled. Instagram's analytics showed that although I had a couple of thousand followers, only a few hundred of them were even seeing what I was posting. On Twitter, where I had nearly ten thousand followers that had mostly been accumulated during my previous work as a political journalist, the figures were even worse. Most of my TikToks barely made it to views in three figures. Clearly, I was doing it wrong. But how?
I couldn't find any answers, although there's a seemingly inexhaustible supply of information out there on this topic. Everyone in this space seemed to publicly agree that "social media was really important for book promotion" and pointed to the viral success of various books on BookTok, but nobody was able to go into more detail about how this was achieved, or if it was even applicable to a non-fiction book by a non-celebrity author. When I tried to explore this world, it seemed to me like the old-fashioned word-of-mouth effect was just being channeled through a new medium. Books mostly weren't gaining momentum on TikTok because their authors were making top notch viral videos, but because readers and bookish influencers were recommending them to each other and posting about their experiences. It was the quality of the book, the canny distribution of advance reading copies and marketing materials by publishers, and the work's ability to speak to a moment that made the difference. I didn't really see how my own social media activities could fit into this ecosystem. People would either find and like the book, or they wouldn't. Did I even need to be there?
Every time I posted, I felt worse. From the outside, my attempts to "do" social media seriously probably looked inconsequential, but they consumed a major portion of my thoughts. What I was doing felt inauthentic and, as the book came out and started getting reviews, like boasting for no reason other than to boast. The choppy nature of the algorithms meant that there was no consistent community on these apps with whom I was sharing my progress through the publishing process and no guarantee even that those were interested would see what I was sharing. When I did in-person events about the book and spoke to readers over the signing table, they would tell me that they had come because they had liked my first book, or enjoyed my current podcast, Shedunnit, or had been a fan of my old one, SRSLY. One person drove several hours to see me at a literary festival because I had put a link to the event in a postscript in my sporadic email newsletter. Nobody I met had been motivated by what I had been doing on social media, even though making those posts had been consuming the vast majority of the time and effort I had to devote to book promotion. This is anecdotal data, for sure, but so much of how the success or otherwise of a book is defined is vibes-based that I felt fine about allowing it to inform me. It only backed up what the social media platforms' analytics had been telling me, anyway.
By the mid point of last year my book had been out for a couple of months and the expectation to market it as much as possible was dying away. My anxiety simmered down to the point where I could assess matters more objectively. This was situation as I saw it: I had put a lot of work time and mental energy into social media because I had been told by lots of trustworthy sources — like people who worked in publishing, fellow authors and my writers' union — that it was the best way to help my book reach as many interested readers as possible. In fact, my posts had reached very few people and contributed very little to the success of the book. Plus, they were very time consuming to make so had eaten up leisure time and my capacity to do other work. There had also been negative side effects in the form of vastly increased screen time and that disagreeable mental habit of seeing my entire existence as potential posts. There was only one possible conclusion: social media was not for me.
More than that, I felt that there was something of an "emperor's new clothes" situation at work. Being a social media star is a skillset completely distinct from being someone who writes books — they may overlap occasionally, but it's not the norm. Yet I suspect that every non-celebrity and midlist author will have felt the pressure at some point to "be more active on social media" because otherwise they aren't "pulling their weight" for their book. I wasn't alone in finding that the effort:reward ratio was entirely out of whack, either. Plenty of peers that I spoke to with online creative businesses were happy to share their experiences of withdrawing partially or fully from social media (for all sorts of reasons including harassment, burnout and parenting) only to find that their sales were largely or even entirely unaffected the next time they had a project to promote. One had closed an account with a following in the six figures and switched to communicating with customers only via an email newsletter, and business was even better than before (likely because all of those subscribed were actually receiving the emails they had signed up for). I began to wonder. Was this all, in fact, nonsense?
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