I don’t know if you been following much the not-the-news lately but it’s been a strange couple of weeks for Authors Online. I don’t mean this or that inconsequential literary list and assorted albeit foreseeable reactions to it — it’s been a strange couple of weeks because the environment in which Authors Online promote their work is changing, and I’d say it isn’t changing for the better.
Earlier this month Substack announced the roll out of a product called Notes. Notes is very similar to Twitter, only that instead of getting retweeted you get restacked, and other lame differences of the kind, plus more significant ones, like the absence of an algorithm or adverts. This caused Twitter’s owner to throw his toys off the pram and suddenly Substack was all but banished from Space Musk’s site. First, tweets that included Substack links couldn’t be retweeted, or even liked. Then the ban went as far as Twitter marking every link leading to Substack as potentially malicious (which might be accurate on many occasions anyway). Then searches of Substack returned results mentioning “newsletter” instead. Later, perhaps because Twitter and Substack share some of the same investors there was peace, and now Substack is no longer banned in the dying bird app. At least for now. This, on top of recent changes on Twitter’s algorithm that make it harder for tweets pointing towards a word beyond the platform to be seen, opens an interesting series of questions about the future of this app and how writers use it. The problem of playing in someone else’s yard is that the rules of engagement might change overnight and then Game Over.
The opinion of many a Twitter user these days is that along came Musk and ruined Twitter, that things are no longer what they used to be, when Jack Dorsey was at the helm and things were perfect. But as much as I dislike this petty man, I mean Musk, this is an unfair assessment, at least when it comes to Twitter’s usefulness as a place to share external content. Thing is, Twitter was always rubbish for sharing stuff. Already in 2015, Derek Thompson nodded towards this, in his article The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting. By looking at engagement data Thompson concluded that a sharing culture doesn’t necessarily translate into a clicking culture, and that engagements with the content of tweets with links were quite poor. This in turn, translates into the need to excrete tweets like mad, so that you are eventually noticed.
You might arrive at the same conclusion by looking at the “view tweet analytics” tab in any of your tweets. Look at this one, for example. This tweet has been pinned to my profile for almost a year. It has 6,537 impressions (the number of times it has been seen); it has 39 link clicks. If my maths are correct that’s 0.59 percent of clicks per total number of impressions. Most of my tweets that include links perform similarly — lately even worse (due to the aforementioned changes to Twitter’s algorithm). Now, this might say more about my popularity than the platform, and since I can’t view other people’s analytics I shall die believing I’m a fucking loser. But this means that Twitter as a sharing medium is useless for me. Sadly, and some might disagree, I have to conclude the same about Notes. My conclusion, after giving this Twitter alternative a go for a few days, is that much like Twitter it boosts already popular accounts and that by using it I’m talking to myself, in public. No one remembers Mastodon, and Facebook and Instagram are so bad for sharing anything but fake news and shitty photos that there’s little point in considering them. Someone might ask “what about TikTok?!” but I’m 46 and I’m not in any sex offenders register so I have no business on that platform. So I’m stuck with text-based apps, as the good Author Online I am.
My overall feeling is that these apps only make sense if you are willing to be chatty, or enjoy shitposting, or are hungry for engagements and have a talent for writing short clickbait, of the kind that can make you go viral, with no other objective than being noticed for your fifteen minutes of fame. If the reason you are online is to share your work with others, not to write social media content for free (so that once in a while someone might click on a link, and even less occasionally buy one of your books) then it might make little sense to frequent these spaces. I guess one answer to the question of how not to talk against the wind would be to bite the cyanide pill and subscribe to Twitter Blue, so that your tweets feature higher in the ranks and so on, but as this product grows in popularity so will grow the possibility of your words getting lost in a sea of other words. So maybe the problem resides elsewhere? Maybe relentless self-promotion isn’t the way to go about being a writer?
One of the biggest coups of the publishing industry has pulled has been to convince writers that they have to be their own PR machine. What this abdication of duty doesn’t take into account is that writers will never have the reach or the contacts of a publisher and to expect they do is unrealistic. If a publisher doesn’t do the promotion work for a writer there is little a writer can do to redress this. I’m not talking here about indie presses struggling to interest Sunday papers’s editors in their books — I’m talking about the top down tendency to leave the author alone and expect miracles, just because there’s social media at their disposal. Let me give you a concrete example: a couple of years ago a good friend published a book with an imprint of a relatively big publisher. My friend was asked to be active on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. I really don’t know what the publisher’s business plan was, but the fact that they didn’t even to organise a book launch or bothered to promote the book beyond some online posts is quite revealing. What is the point of having a publisher if they don’t do anything to get your work out there? Certainly being self-published is better than this1? Since if you self-publish at least you have creative control over your work… Oh, no, but the prestige of traditional publishing! Fuck that, because only other writers pay attention to such things.
The bottom line is that metrics don’t write books. The job of a writer is to write books; the job of a publisher is to publish and sell them. There are writers who make every possible effort so that their books don’t sell — from bunking from events, to having the wit of a catalogue of nails, to being absolute dangers — and I pity whoever has to try to work with them. But authors aren’t advertising or PR executives and pretending they are helps no one, especially when the tools at a writer’s disposal are so defective and getting worse. Maybe writers need to go back to the desk and focus on writing? Alternatively, let’s avoid the effort of writing page after page of stuff no one will ever read and let’s focus on shitposting on our favourite platforms. This might get us the attention we crave. Or at least the one we deserve.
Once more, I have no issues with self-publishing. But since I am not willing to become my own PR machine this isn’t something I’d consider for my own work.
When I have the energy I plan on writing a
blah-g post on my website on selling one’s house and social media brain and what it taught me about writing etc. and I will link to this, of course.
But since I don’t have the energy and headspace or ability to even hit tab to create indents for paragraphs, I will continue to use my replies (however short or long) to your essays and posts (there’s a difference regardless of where or how it’s published) as my only writing:
“The bottom line is that metrics don’t write books.”
Metrics don’t sell houses either. Metrics don’t do anything but be the arse wiping paper that they are.
Case in point: our house went up for sale. Zillow is the Google of house buying and selling. Meaning it scrapes information from legit databases for agent listings nation-wide. how do they make money? They sell that information to local companies. Already received invites in mail for movers, credit cards, etc.
Week one: over 1000 views, 200 saves.
200 saves!!!
Whohoo!!! Let’s go!
Number of actual requests for viewing: 21.
I will not be getting into how many out of these 21 that week lacked the imagination to visualize very accurate photos or how many of these visitors were “shocked” that we had stairs despite gorgeous and clear photos showing the split-level home.
21 actual visits in that one week. 200 “saves” on Zillow which is the social media platform for homes. Just one week.
One buyer is all it takes, all that we needed, all that it took.
Of course, one might argue that one buyer of a book etc doesn’t allow one to make a living as a writer (but you have already written extensively about that), but tell you what? Finding that one reader who sincerely appreciates that which you wrote is what the metric can never measure.
I wish I had known the value of that one reader as soon as I started. I do now.
That’s all there is.