An Anxious Person's Guide To Social Media & Marketing
Buckle up, we're going places.
Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon, the newsletter for writers who don’t want rehashed advice or warmed-over listicles and who writers who want a dose of motivation along with some good writing craft advice.
I’m John, and it’s my pleasure to help you write better. If you want a roadmap to a better book in 30 days or if you want customized help with getting your book published, or you need a book edited, let’s have a chat.
Today, I’ve got something that was going to live behind a paywall, but since subscriptions haven’t really taken off yet, I want everyone to have this.
I’m anxious. I’m anxious all the time.
I’ve talked about it before. And I tend to use it as a lens and a filter for everything I do. I know that’s not a great idea, I know it’s led to a lot of not-great moments and put me in more than a few not-great situations, but it’s also put in a few positions to really learn before walking away from a lot of people, places, and things with something to think about.
It’s a double-edged sword, for sure, barbed or hooked as needed to cut both ways. I miss out on a lot, I hold myself back from a lot, but I also think through more things and have a better radar for bullshit than if I were still barrelling through life without thinking twice.
I’m anxious and I love social media. Which is weird, right? It takes a lot to get me to do something, yet I love sitting in the office or on the couch with my phone in hand telling people all kinds of things or looking at what other people saying. I love engaging through the buffer and medium of the platform and device, connected but separated, together but isolated.
So I thought this week I would lay out for you some social media options for 4 popular platforms with a quick note on a fifth. I’m coming at these platforms from the standpoint of a writer who has a finished but not-yet published book and who has little to no audience on the platform (under 30 followers).
And since I don’t have much of a segue, let’s just get started.
Threads
We’re starting with the sixth platform and a little note. Please read this article. Here’s why it matters: a platform that can’t retain people isn’t a platform where a lot of people are looking. Some writer might see this as some great advantage, and in the short term it may be, but long term, it’s very likely a ghost town in the making. Tread (and thread) carefully.
Bluesky
The app everyone wants an invite code for is … well, it’s not bad. It has a similar structure to how Twitter used to be, and the atmosphere is one that’s far lighter in tone and I haven’t really run into too many bad actors or anyone JAQing (just-asking-questions) off, but my experience there has been far more social than professional.
Somehow some way I’m seeing far more people from marginalized communities than I am from professionals using the space. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I don’t mind people sharing art of their sexy furry fantasy or a picture of their dog doing something cute, but in weeding through the sexy stuff (and there’s a good amount of it) and the hardship stuff (a lot of people from those marginalized communities are in dire need of mutual aid, support, and care), I’m not seeing a lot of promos or ads for things that aren’t sex work or commissioned art.
This might be because there are no hashtags. There’s a search function but it’s a little finicky. Bluesky is a work-in-progress and as such you have to bend a little to the progress when it comes to getting an experience you want. Give a little to get a little and you’ll see that its use of lists and add-ons help keep the space feeling less congested but not quiet.
What Bluesky gives us is a blank slate and a chance to get away from social media exhaustion. It can be whatever you make it, but you have to be intentional in the making. It’s a space to be curated and tended, so that means taking your book promos and letting them mingle and marinate alongside the times where you talk about your garden or complain about tiddlywinks or sidestep around the lengthy conversation about girlcock (that was last week).
Bluesky is a chance and a space for you to be you, but to do so fully, without the assumption that you have to be “professional” and that “professional” people act or don’t act a certain way. (Which is a bullshit patriarchal sexist classist racist label anyway, so let’s ditch it). Put all of you out there, because you’re not always and only your writing, even if, like me, you built too much of your identity around what you do and not enough around who you are.
To be clear, there is part of Bluesky that isn’t sex workers sex working sexily and it isn’t people sharing gender euphoria amid random photos of aroused blue wolves and foxes, and that part is growing. But if you’re jumping onto the Bluesky bandwagon, please be aware that it’s not Twitter 2.0, and that doesn’t make it bad.
TikTok
I have a TikTok account. I have it entirely so that I can see TikToks and not at all so I can make them. I have thought about making them. I have had serious moments where I’m laying lonely in bed staring at the ceiling thinking that what the world needs is my writing advice in TikTok-digestible size.
But if YouTube gives me a panic attack whenever I think about plugging in my camera, I cannot imagine how bad it would be to do it on the regular on my phone.
TikTok is so often dominated by BookTok that it’s important we take a moment to call out BookTok for what it is: people who inserted themselves as influencers in a space already dominated by popularity contests, gatekeepers, and keeping with way too many Joneses. It’s all a set of "cool kids at the cool kids table” with a few grifters or anecdotal marginally successful stories sprinkled in. It’s not great. (But you knew this already if you heard today’s podcast)
So what’s an author to do? How can you wield TikTok without falling prey to the reindeer games of BookTok? You offer something other than book sales - try writer experience. That’s something a gatekeeper can’t really gatekeep, because it’s individual to you. What’s it like to write what you’re writing? What’s it like to be a writer seeing the media you’re seeing? Why are you doing it? Put aside all the worries about production values and prize connection for the 90 or so seconds a TikTok can run.
Reach your audience as though each member of it is having a one-on-one conversation with you, and you’ll do more good for your career than any amount of shared swooning over a mediocre bestseller could.
Substack
There’s something a little strange about talking about the platform you’re using to talk about the platform, like talking about someone while they’re in the room and can hear you.
I’ll say this for Substack - they’re doing quite a few things right and that should encourage you as a writer trying to get people in one place to see your writing. The Substack newsletter is a popular (and FREE) way of having something to send out to people, provided it is something more substantial that a more typical CTA (call-to-action, you know, a sales flyer) you’d see from ConvertKit or MailChimp or Ghost.
And Substack Notes is … well, it’s also good, though I can’t say for certain that it’s good enough to be a thing every writer clamors for. It was a novelty, I have in the past been excited by it, but the lustre has worn off, and I can’t say I do a lot more than click past Notes now.
Author’s Note: It was at this point, after a break, that I sort of lost my whole train of thought, and after repeated attempts to get back on track, I elected to finish this week’s newsletter with some audio. And a transcript will follow.
And here’s the transcript:
00:00:00] JOHN: There's an immense sense of posity and arrogance when you call something a guide to something else, particularly with social media, particularly with any sort of creative endeavor as if how you post, wherever you post is like a recipe. Like we take one cup of this and a tablespoon of this and maybe two grams of that, and then all of a sudden we just have success in a, in a recipe that.
[00:00:29] JOHN: Um, that everyone can follow. I think it's fundamentally, Clueless. Stupid, pointless, bad, wrong. To assume that a blanket approach to social media is still going to be functional. Now I say that with full knowledge that the vast majority of people are still gonna keep doing the same thing. They're gonna keep doing the same kind of posting periodically or.
[00:00:55] JOHN: Constantly dropping links and sales pages and then [00:01:00] wondering hope, upon hope, if someone will click a link and they'll just keep doing that. They'll go from platform to platform doing the same thing and hoping to get a different response. It bothers me that people consider social media, particularly as a creative with a product.
[00:01:19] JOHN: It bothers me that people make such a hard segregation between this idea of I am a person selling a thing and I am a person I. Because the hoops they put themselves through, the levels of detachment, the amount of pressure and expectation they carry for themselves that somebody who has a thing to sell has to comport themselves, or a writer more specifically has to comport themselves a certain way is, well, it's.
[00:01:50] JOHN: It's fucking bullshit. This preposterous notion that there is an appropriate, I'm making air quotes, appropriate way to [00:02:00] act and behave in a platform when so many other people are posting pictures of their cats or cookies or coffee cups or their butt or. Nail polish or board games or screenshots from video games, but all of a sudden a writer is somehow expected to be above that, , and that's just not accurate. So a guide that says, do X on this platform is a guide designed to fail because what you need to do to succeed on a platform, and really you don't need to be on every platform just. Pick two. There's plenty out there. But what you need to do on those platforms that you choose is build community, build connection amongst people.
[00:02:44] JOHN: Now, I know community is a loaded word because people immediately see community and they think a group of people who will make dollar signs happen when my link goes out , and , that's part of it, I guess. But it can't be all of it. And it can't only be [00:03:00] that thing. Because most importantly, especially now, where the days of sitting in sitting at the knee of a writer and having them dispense wisdom or having one single place to organize all your ideas, those days are gone.
[00:03:17] JOHN: Social media killed those days, , and then we killed social media. Because we let it, instead of becoming this sort of place to elevate ourselves and restore ourselves and connect ourselves, we let it be become this place where we poison ourselves. We toxify ourselves, we wreck more than we love. We turn it into vicious competition.
[00:03:40] JOHN: We turn it into harm. We turn it into self-harm. When social media could have been a way that we built. A vast web of connection and knowledge and friendship and learning and education and care and self-care and support, and we missed that chance. And now we reap [00:04:00] the poisoned fruit that we sowed. Twitter is a racist, toxic sludge fest cesspool where people either.
[00:04:10] JOHN: they stew in this space waiting for the next disaster to happen. Or they ostrich, they put their head in the sand and just keep doing what they're doing because privilege or ignorance or something will, will insulate them in some way, shape, or form. So if we just pretend like we don't give a shit or we don't do that here, then it'll be just fine, even though there are.
[00:04:34] JOHN: Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. I don't know how many people actively harmed by our complicit silence, let alone the direct actions of terrible people. When you find the platforms that you wanna call home, whether that's Blue Sky or Threads, although Threads is smaller now, or TikTok or YouTube, or a podcast or a newsletter [00:05:00] or anything like that at all, what you must do is figure out how you will offer yourself in.
[00:05:10] JOHN: Whatever degree or in whatever quantity of yourself you wanna offer so that other people may feel comforted and comfortable enough to offer themselves in response. It doesn't matter if you never engage in like some of the more abstract reindeer games. It doesn't matter if you never participate in a silly elbow Saturday or whatever dumb shit that is.
[00:05:39] JOHN: But it does matter if you contribute more than just, Hey, buy my book. Hey, buy my book. Hey, buy my book. Hey, buy my book. Because in that way, you are no different than the promoted ads. We've mostly fled Twitter to allude. You have a responsibility as a creative person making art to connect with [00:06:00] people, not only for the purpose and function of selling that art to them, but.
[00:06:04] JOHN: You have made this thing that other people can find something good in. They can find peace, they can find comfort. They can find connection. They can find interest, they can find pleasure, they can find something, and you've made this thing for them, and you have a responsibility to help connect them with this item, and they have a responsibility to connect with you in response.
[00:06:26] JOHN: And your platform usage, warts and all, imperfections at all, multitudes that you are and all or multitudes that you choose to curate and expose, either literally or metaphorically. They all matter. You use the platform, how you want to use the platform, so long as you are using the platform. Honestly, honestly, about yourself, honestly about your work.
[00:06:54] JOHN: Not just the sale of it, but the production of it, the feeling of it, the thought of it, the fear of it, [00:07:00] the joy of it, the whatever of it, but also the reality of being you. I've sat on Blue Sky for the last two days, and you know what? I've encountered a lot of very anxious people, right alongside a lot of people who are overjoyed that their hormone replacement therapy has given them better boobs.
[00:07:20] JOHN: Right alongside people who really, desperately want to talk about wrestling right alongside people who desperately want, you know, 10 more fans on their picture photography website or whatever, or two more people can buy cookies or whatever. All of these things exist, can current simultaneous next to each other.
[00:07:41] JOHN: The table is truly full and there is always a seat for you. But you have to come there and you have to be honest, authentic, natural. It's okay if you're nervous. It's okay if you're quiet. It's [00:08:00] okay if you don't want to show off your butt or your underwear or your. Crotch or who knows what. It's okay if you don't have a cat to take pictures of.
[00:08:10] JOHN: It's okay. If you never want to get too deep with what your children are doing, it's okay if you have nothing to contribute to the commentary or the discourse around, you know, plastic consumption when it comes to household cleaning products. It's okay if you can't be everywhere and be everything to everyone.
[00:08:31] JOHN: No one needs you to do that. No one's ever needed you to do that. What they've needed, what they've wanted is for you to show up and just be you bravely. Eagerly. I. Authentically, they just want you to be you. So sometimes you're gonna talk about your book, sometimes you're gonna talk about writing. Other times you're gonna talk about that cake that your neighbor made that you're still envying after all these years.
[00:08:56] JOHN: Or the weird shit you found in your front yard, or the strange spam [00:09:00] email you got, or who knows what you just talk about. Whatever you want. Anxious or not. Why not own your anxiety? Why not own your fear? Speak to it. You think you're the only person who's feeling that right now with the death of single platform social media, i e a blog and maybe a Twitter feed.
[00:09:23] JOHN: You now have the. Incredible opportunity to invent yourself and reinvent yourself and expose yourself and be true to yourself and give new things a try. Going forward in marketing means being more and progressively more courageous as you go and more honest as you go. Social media isn't there to exist in the hyper curated to exist in the, I wish this were my life, so I'm going to put on this bravado in this production.
[00:09:57] JOHN: Social media is there for you to lower [00:10:00] that guard. But only do so if you feel safe. Only do so if you feel you're in a good position for it, and even then only lower that guard to a degree and in a direction and for a reason that you want. It's okay to leave some walls up. It's okay to have some barriers.
[00:10:17] JOHN: It's okay to not cover everything. But you want to use social media, not just as a sales tool, but as a connective tool. It's duct tape and it's gonna bind us all together. That's the opportunity. That's the hope. That's the plan that's worth thinking about. So go think about it. Go find two platforms where you think you stand a good chance not at getting a million bajillion units of engagement, but go find a place where you can be you.
[00:10:53] JOHN: And you can make some friends and you can say some things and be heard and felt, heard and listened to. [00:11:00] Give that a shot, give it a fair chance. Don't just look at it in terms of, well, these fuckers aren't clicking my link, so fuck 'em. Because it's never been about that. Social media is social first and media second.
[00:11:20] JOHN: Don't flip that around. Don't get it twisted. Be social. Be honest. That's the rising tide that will lift all boats. Not how many sales links can I cram into something over the course of 15 days, be you always. I'll talk to you next week.
Love you all. Thank you for being here. See you next week.
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