Why I Don’t Market on Social Media

Spend any amount of time reading what authors post on any social media platform, and you’ll see that many of us spend most of our days and nights trying to connect with our readers and showcase our books. On the surface, this seems like a slam dunk. With social media, you can directly connect with readers. No middleman. But is that the reality? I’d argue it isn’t.

Of course this all my own personal experience, things that I’ve observed over the years on various platforms. You should take what I say with a grain of salt. There are, after all, exceptions to every rule. Anyway.

It’s my belief that social media is in fact awful for authors. There are a few reasons.

First, there is in fact a middleman. It isn’t a human, though. It’s the algorithm, and it does a fantastic job keeping artists from reaching customers. Why? Because the business model of all social media platforms is the monopolization of your attention. They need to keep you on the app for as long as possible. So, if you’re asking people to leave to visit your website, or Amazon, or whatever, you’re trying to get people to leave their feeds. Platforms don’t like that. So posts about your writing or painting or music or whatever get throttled.

Second, readers aren’t looking to connect with authors. A lot of readers do use social media to find books to read. But they follow reviewers, not authors. You know who follows authors? Other authors. It’s great for networking! And other writers are a great support system. But they aren’t your audience. If you make a post about your book and other authors (kindly) support you by reposting it, it’s just going out into the wider author network. It isn’t really going to readers.

Third, it’s all engagement farming anyway. Every singe day I see scores of posts that amount to, “Writers! Share your books so we can read them!” Except that almost never works. These people are just trying to boost their presence by getting desperate authors to engage with them. And it works… for them. But it doesn’t really sell books. And don’t get me started on the scammers waiting to pounce on authors in the comments, trying to peddle their “services” and whatnot.

Now, a couple of caveats. There are ways you can leverage social media as an author. You can reach out to popular reviewers to see if they’ll talk about your book. You can also spend money on ads. Remember, these platforms exist to make a profit, so if you spend money on their ads, they’re happy. And last, you can have a post that goes viral.

The problem with all three of those things is that they’re unreliable or expensive. Popular reviewers are bombarded with requests. Ads work better when scaled, which means you need a massive budget if you want to sell more than a few copies here and there. You can read stories about authors who pull in $10k a month because they spend $5-$6k a month on ads. And good luck chasing viral posts.

So, where does that leave authors? Screaming into a void about our books, unfortunately.