Don’t Sell Your Soul to Social Media—but Don’t Underestimate Its Importance to Your Writing Career Either

The number one thing I hear from both emerging and established authors is some version of “I hate social media.”

One author told me, “I literally don’t get it. So you post pictures of books and people say they like it? What’s the point?”

Another said, “Social media scares me. People are mean.”

A lot—and by a lot, I mean about three quarters of the writers I publish—have little to no social media presence when they sign a contract with one of my imprints (Catalyst Press, Flare Books, and PowersSquared). With trepidation, somewhere along the way, they’ll bring this fact up, and ask, “Do I really need to be on social media?”

Look, I get it. I get it 100%.

Social media can feel like a huge waste of time. You want to write, not spend your time posting something, liking other people’s posts. You want to live life, you want to be out there doing all the things. You don’t want to spend your time in front of some screen emitting blue light.

Social media can also be addictive. One author I know got sucked into toxic YA author drama after her first book was published. She found herself drawn in more and more and more—the adrenalin, the feeling of being attacked and needing to defend herself, the desire to strike out in revenge. For her own mental health, she had to delete her accounts and get off it altogether.

Plus, and here’s the kicker, for the most part, your social media activity won’t sell books. There is no direct correlation between the time you spend on social media and your book sales. (Caveat: Many authors have TikTok accounts that have been successful with book sales. This appears to be the one exception. I’m not really sure I understand how they’ve done this marvelous feat, but I celebrate it, and wish I could figure out the magic formula myself.)

As a publisher, to be perfectly honest, social media has been probably one of my lowest priorities. But this week, its importance was driven home to me.

Some time ago, a literary magazine published an interview with one of our authors. It was a thoughtful, wide-ranging interview that really highlighted both the book and the author, elevating his status through their considerable platform.

Earlier this week, I reached out to the magazine’s editor to propose another collaboration. She responded that she wasn’t inclined to do so, given our lack of social media engagement with the author interview. We had posted the interview on Facebook but we had failed to repost it on Instagram or X, despite being tagged.

I know that many of my readers might think, “What’s the big deal? Why should it matter so much?”

At first, I too felt defensive. But eventually, during the course of our exchange, I remembered something and that something made me realize she was right.

One of the things I emphasize all of the time to my team, to my authors, to my business coach is this: The business of writing and publishing books is a business of relationships. To succeed in this world, you have to build and maintain professional and personal bonds with other people, in both real life and across the internet.

As a publishing company, our business model is about promoting art that explores conflicting and contradictory facets of the human experience, and seeking to create a community that engages with ideas to create a better world for future generations. As writers and publishers, we are public intellectuals. As public intellectuals, we are engaging in public conversations. And this editor, who was frustrated with our lack of social media engagement, was expressing her disappointment that we had failed to reciprocate in our relationship with her. She had responded to our invitation to have a public conversation. She had participated. And we had failed to participate in the conversation that the community—our community—was having about a book we had put out into the world for that very purpose of having a public conversation.

Public conversations, participating in the community that is responding to art and ideas, is something that social media facilitates better than most other things in our global world.

Our lack of social media engagement meant we were on the soccer field in the middle of the game but we weren’t being team players; in fact, we weren’t being players at all. We were looking at the grass or maybe the stands as the ball sailed right past us.

So.

I will still tell authors not to sell their soul to social media. It should never corrupt the time you have to write, or steal the time you spend with your family and friends, doing real things in the real world.

But we should also recognize that as creators, our books have entered into a protracted, far-reaching conversation, and most of that conversation these days is happening online.

We’re part of that community….and we need to participate.