What if There's No Social Media?

But also: A Surprise Sale for No Reason!

Hey friends!

GUESS WHAT??? I’m running a sale on AGENTS & BOOKS SUBSCRIPTIONS! For no particular reason! Get 25% for one year!!!!! The biggest discount yet!! Subscribers get Thursday posts and access to the whole archive! Q&A Thursdays! New things yet to be announced! Click this link to sign up and share it with your friends. Offer good until May 3rd!

---

OK, so, on to the task at hand. You may have noticed that a billionaire just bought Twitter and made the old owners of Twitter even more billionaires. Bully for them. Surprising no one, there are many opinions out there about this. Some think it’s bad! It’s good! We’re finally going to get an edit button! Something about fReE SPeeCh! Marketplace of ideas! Capitalism!!!!! Or other stuff. All these opinions are well and good and amount to nothing more than increased traffic on the site that Mr. Moneybags just bought, but there are others wondering, worrying, about what we do now. Do we leave? Where do we go? What about my platform?

If you’re a writer or illustrator or artist or journalist or whatever on Twitter, you may be wondering what is going to happen to the primary way you communicate with your readers/customers if Twitter becomes an unmoderated cesspool, I mean, bastion of free speech. (For the record, free speech means you can say whatever you want, but you are not free from the consequences of such.) If Twitter gets even more unusable than it already is (especially for some communities) then what do we do? Where do we tweet about our cover reveals and giveaways and deal announcements? How are we supposed to build a platform for the books we haven’t even sold yet if there’s no platform?

I don’t know. No one will know until we get there, and I believe it’ll be a slow trickle of migration rather than a mass exodus. If you do have to find another platform, I think you’ll have time to plan it out. But maybe you won’t have to? Maybe it will be fine? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re like me and you want to plan it out regardless, here are some things to think about:

Go Where Your Readers Are

Twitter might be the town square for a lot of different kinds of reader, and maybe a lot of your readers are just there out of habit. But they might also be somewhere else, maybe even a place you don’t know about. Are there message boards associated with a professional organization in your genre, like SCBWI or SFWA or something else? Does your local chapter have a WhatsApp group? That might seem like small potatoes when you compare it to thousands of people on Twitter, but you didn’t start out with thousands of followers on Twitter either and you have to start somewhere. I’m not saying you spam a WhatsApp group with BUY MY BOOK but it might lead you to other venues where like minded people are talking and congregating online.

Are your readers on Instagram now, and you just didn’t notice? TikTok? LinkedIn??? (I know but apparently people hang out on LinkedIn!) None of these options are perfect. They may not exactly replicate what you have built on Twitter. But just make sure you’re looking at other places your readers might be, instead of pretending what you see is all there is.

Build Something You Control

One way not to be at the mercy of billionaires buying social media platforms for the lolz is to build your own thing. I don’t mean build the next Twitter, (but let me know if you do), but build something you control so you’re not at the mercy of these tech bros. Unless you’re coding the whole things yourself, which I know you don’t have time for, you’re not going to be completely free of tech bros (she says while sending you this message on Substack). BUT if you’re at the helm as much as possible, on your site, newsletter, blog, Discord, BBS, or what have you, then, well, you’re at the helm. The problem is these things take time to grow. Start now, and you’ll be better prepared if and when you need it. And if you do it now, you’ll be able to publicize your whatever while people are still on Twitter.

Publishing Will Catch Up

Eventually, if everyone leaves Twitter and Twitter is no longer a viable way to promote your work, then publishers will eventually figure that out and not hold it against you. I’m not saying it will be immediately responsive, but if you’re in the situation where you’re trying to sell your book and an editor is like but what about Twitter, and you say uhhhh, Twitter’s dead, the editor is not going to automatically reject your work because you haven’t met some secret follower count. (There is no secret follower count that equals a book deal.) I am old enough to remember when it was important how many “hits” your blog got when writers were trying to get blog-to-book-deals. Many of us patiently explained to editors (love you, editors!) that “hits” weren’t a thing, weren’t an accurate metric by which to measure site traffic, and before too long we all figured it out and started talking about “uniques.” Ahhhhh, the good old days. Publishing will catch up. It won’t be the world’s smoothest or quickest transition, but it will happen. When has publishing ever been quick anyway?

My advice is to keep calm and carry on, and go looking for other places your readers might be anyway. Either way, that place you might find will be a good addition to your social media platform, whether it replaces Twitter or not.

Stay safe, friends. Get vaxed.

XOXOXOXOX,

Kate