When I try to sell my book, I’m doing a chore that I don’t like. I prefer to concentrate on what I know it can do. We can all learn something new there, maybe something about ourselves.
You can find very old people and very young people sharing their experiences, talented people showing off their sports, crafts, and art, registered experts talking about mental illness-there are so many people doing interesting things. It’s really hard to make that look cool.ĭespite its essentially obvious nature, other parts of TikTok are amazing to me. It’s too performative and nakedly commercial that ever-present sell sell sell vibe too transactional. Imagine what TikTok would be if Brandon Taylor or other writers like him adopted it. But TikTok aggregates more slowly because it lacks the critical mass of writers. I built most of my audience there, from a small but engaged following to a bigger and bigger list over the years, and I think most authors have doggedly done the same. But that’s not the real utility.Ĭonsidering the direction Twitter is headed, I’ve thought that TikTok might take the place that Twitter currently holds for writers. Don’t get me wrong-I’m going to brag about my books. That’s the real utility of an online community, that’s what’s reliable in it, not book sales. Newer, greener writers often ask questions about publishing and royalties, and I’ve been happy to respond. People ask questions, and other people can stitch the original and respond. One of the things I’ve seen work beautifully on TikTok is that it’s a highly accessible network of information. It’s an interesting place to build community and to make new friends. BookTok has been good for getting to know other writers. What I am gonna do is keep talking to people. Those who don’t brush up on their dances. BookTok notoriety is just another layer of the same phenomenon where those who have, get. Were they nobody from nowhere and then became stars? In most cases, no. When people hold up examples of genre authors who have been hit by that algorithmic lightning of going viral (Naomi Novik, Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Imagine a short video that begins with a wide grin and the question: “Guess who spent the whole day in the university library?” They are my people! That video turned me on to their work, and I might not have found them any other way.Īside from encounters like these, I find BookTok overall to be mystifying. This is a place where I can find an author who’s really after my own heart. I love that TikTok lets me get behind the scenes, seeing a little bit about how a book is coming together. They often share on TikTok about what they are researching for their next book-and I’m totally going to buy it. Texas-based speculative author and climate activist Sim Kern ( Real Sugar is Hard to Find) shares their wide-ranging and in-depth research, and produces fiction based on that science that’s both pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. They may talk about their own books for sale, but those are far in the background. They talk about their opinions, share the great books they’ve read. Mostly the writers I know who use TikTok are there to be enthusiastic about their genre and their book. How I think it does work is a little bit of discovery. Occasionally, other authors I know who believe that BookTok is the next big thing tell me I gotta do this. That’s a good thing-I’m naturally rebellious, and anything someone tells me I’ve got to do, I’m not going to do. No agent or editor has ever told me BookTok will make me a star or a bestselling author.
I’ve never been put under direct pressure to get on TikTok. TikTok, and particularly the subculture of BookTok, is always screaming sell sell sell! And I hate it. It offers no illusion that I can just be the dork that I am and connect with people. TikTok is a little different in that at least it’s always been honest. People want to make money off us instead of letting us have a good time. On TikTok, just like on Twitter, we’re there to have a good time, and people will make it a bad time. But I didn’t get it together until I read Cat Valente’s Substack post: “ Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things,” a polemic on the way social media is used versus how people would like it to be an engine of profit. I have been grumbling about this for years, about each platform in its own time. Nothing anyone has to say about TikTok is new.
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