Let’s be honest: most writers didn’t get into this business to dance on camera. We got into it to sit alone in a room and make things up. Then someone explained that “discoverability” means posting three times a day on platforms designed by people half our age, and suddenly the dream involves learning trending audio.
I hate social media. I’m doing it anyway. Here’s how to survive it without losing your mind or your dignity.
Pick one platform and ignore the guilt
You do not need to be everywhere. The gurus will tell you to repurpose everything across seven platforms, and the gurus sell courses, not books. Pick the one platform where your readers actually hang out — for genre fiction right now, that’s TikTok and Instagram Reels — and let the rest go. One platform done consistently beats five platforms done anxiously.
I chose short video because my books are visual and ridiculous, and a ten-second clip of a dragon sells the vibe faster than any ad copy. Your mileage will vary. The principle doesn’t: go where the readers are, not where the experts tell you to be.
Document, don’t perform
The best advice I ever got about content: you don’t need to perform, you just need to document. Nobody wants to see you doing a trending dance. They do want to see the book cover reveal, the typo that made it to print, the moment you realize chapter twelve makes no sense. Your writing life is already content. You just have to point a camera at it occasionally.
Talk about your books like you’d talk about them to a friend at a bar. That’s the whole trick. Enthusiasm is contagious; polish is optional.
Batch it or it’ll eat you
The algorithm wants consistency, and consistency will destroy you if you try to create daily from scratch. So don’t. Once a week, spend an hour making five or six short videos. Post them across the week. Done. You just bought yourself six days of not thinking about it.
I make mine in batches on weekends — a few AI-generated teaser clips, a couple of talking-head rants about writing, whatever I’ve got. Then I schedule or queue them and go back to the actual job, which is writing books.
Engagement is a chore; treat it like one
Reply to comments. Not because the algorithm demands tribute (it does), but because a reader who comments on your video is a reader who might buy your book. Fifteen minutes a day, morning coffee, reply to everything. Then close the app. The infinite scroll is engineered to keep you there; your willpower is not engineered at all. Set the boundary.
Remember what it’s for
Social media is a tool, not a career. The goal was never followers — it’s readers. If your follower count is climbing but nobody’s clicking the link in your bio, something’s wrong with the funnel, not the content. Every post should, directly or indirectly, point at the books. That’s the job.
I still hate social media. But my books have readers I never would have found otherwise, and that’s the trade. An hour a week of mild embarrassment for a career. I’ll take it.
The books I’m awkwardly promoting: the complete I Was Married to a Monster Girl trilogy. Link in bio, as the kids say.
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