Last December, I decided to deactivate my Twitter account and by now it is permanently closed. I did this because of news I saw about tweets being deranked if you include links. This was on top of the deranking my account saw due to not paying for the “Premium” subscription. Honestly, social media never interested me much and the only reason I made a Twitter account was to promote my work. If including links to my books resulted in getting next to no impressions on my tweets, then what was the point of having a Twitter?
My posts were getting fewer impressions before Elon Musk bought Twitter, but after the buyout, I got significantly less. I used to do VSS365 (Very Short Stories 365 days a year) posts, which would get 100+ views on average. After the buyout, they rarely got over 10. I stopped doing them on Twitter because it was a waste of time to spend 10 to 20 minutes writing a VSS post only to get so low impressions. I did haikus for a while but stopped doing them for the same reason. So, the only tweets I made were of my book links and song recommendations from YouTube. Most of the time, the song posts got more impressions than my book links.
Trying to promote your work for free is very hard. Not every tweet goes viral, so it’s unpredictable if your book promotions will get seen. And if book promos are all you post, people will avoid your Twitter page like a plague. So many writing blogs, articles, and videos recommend being on social media to get eyes on your work. I have received some sales after posting on Twitter and Mastodon, but these were too few and far between. I’ve had plenty of link clicks on my tweets, but most of the time that led to no sales. I only ever peaked at about 115 followers. Having such a low following meant barely anyone would care about my work.
To touch on the following aspect a bit more, you need to gain status to have enough people to care about your work. For example, look at celebrities. If they publish a book, it will be a bestseller, and thousands, if not millions, of people will make tweets and videos about that book. People are also more willing to pay a premium for their books. But for lesser-known authors, people are extremely stingy. Like, if a celebrity sold a 300-page book for $60, the average person would buy it no questions asked. If an unknown author sold a 300-page book for $4, the average person would think it’s not worth their money. Most of the time, people would only consider my books when they’re free. My Armored Piercing books have made me the most money while The Invasion of Planet Earth sold the most units for free. Some people have said selling free books can help gain a bigger following, but that’s never been the case for me. I never saw a boost in followers on Twitter or Mastodon after making one of my books free for a short time.
I’ve seen the trend of “follow-for-follow” pushed in the Twitter writing community many times. Basically, you and another author follow each other to build “comradery.” I followed very few people back and only did if I found their page interesting. Follow-for-follow is a terrible practice that no one should follow. I’ve seen people complain about being unfollowed after doing a follow-for-follow. Many people did this for an easy boost in followers and had no intentions of “helping other authors grow.” One author I followed had 10,000 followers and followed 11,000 people. She got some decent engagement, but not the amount you’d expect from someone with so many followers. Most people who follow you never look at your profile. They don’t like or retweet. This was the reason I refused to do follow-for-follow. You get nothing out of it in the end. They don’t share your content and they certainly don’t buy your books. The followers I got normally rarely liked or retweeted my tweets, let alone actually buy my books.
I had some decent moments on Twitter, but overall, it’s more work than it’s worth. If you don’t gain a large following, no amount of posting will lead you anywhere. On top of the deranking of deranking on Twitter nowadays, there’s certainly no point in me being on that site. The only way to effectively promote your work on Twitter is to pay up. Since my marketing budget is zero, deactivating my Twitter was the only logical choice.
I’m still on Mastodon, but I don’t post that often. Maybe I’ll write a blog about my thoughts on being on that platform for almost 4 years, but the short version is that it hasn’t done much for me. I have a tenth of the followers there than I did on Twitter and I have the same issue of my “followers” rarely interacting with my posts. It seems I can’t gain a large and active following regardless of platform. People have been hopping over to BlueSky and I don’t know if I will. It seems nice now, but how will it be in the future? It would be unrealistic for me to assume that simply being on BlueSky would instantly gain me a loyal following. On social media, the quickest way to gain status is to join a bandwagon or be as controversial as possible. The only time I ever gave “critical” opinions was for video games and dumb Twitter policies post-buyout. I’m not willing to “go nuts” to gain followers, but being neutral hasn’t done much for me either.
Aside from Mastodon, you can subscribe to my website via the main page for updates. I also made two group pages, one for Armored Piercing and another for Nibowin: The Island of Death, and I will likely make more for later books. You can follow me on Goodreads, where I recently made a group for Armored Piercing and where Wix blog updates are automatically posted.
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