This is an excerpt from a longer post on ShelleyBurbank.com published Jan. 24, 2025. I'm currently living on the island of Guam with my husband. We've been apartment-hunting and trying out local cuisine. Writing fiction has taken a back seat, but hopefully we'll get settled soon. Meanwhile . . .
The recent TikTok ban (then the non-ban) provoked much discussion and downright angst in other corners of the literary world, but I have to wonder why it came as such a surprise to some people? For as long as I've been learning about platform-building, the smart people in the room gave the same advice: Don't count on social media platforms entirely because you never know when they might fail, change, or become unusable. Build your own website and gather an email list.
I remember feeling frustrated every time I read that advice because everyone knew that nobody read blogs anymore, and getting people to sign up for a newsletter was so much harder than getting them to click that "follow" button. Why should I waste so much energy when Twitter was obviously the way to go?
And then there was BookTok, which took some backlist titles and blew them up into mega best-sellers and made huge names of some authors and created new genres, most notably, Romantasy. Good for them, I thought. It's tempting to follow suit, but do I need to jump on every trend? MUST I go on Tik Tok in order to give my books a chance?
Nope and nope. I just didn't want to go there, and I already hated Twitter, though I had an account as a kind of place-holder.
Now I'm glad I didn't waste my time and energy on either Twitter or Tik Tok. I used the X switch as an excuse to delete my barely breathing Twitter account, and I stuck to Meta products Facebook and Instagram for the past few years. Still, I had this constant feeling of irritation about the whole notion of being obliged to use social media just to reach readers. It felt performative. Maybe a little desperate. And crowded.
I liked the old Facebook. Friends and family sharing photos and recipes and funny little daily things. Then they changed the algorithm, making it increasingly less likely that I'd see the personal posts while throwing paid posts and advertising in my face along with weird meme accounts and bot-run accounts and anything inflammatory that kept eyeballs on the screen.
Recently, I ran into some horrendous, misogynistic rant pits, dumping on women's abilities and basically saying they had one, and only one reason for being alive on this planet, and I thought, This is so not where I want to spend my time.
Still, Facebook had its uses. The one time I ran a Facebook ad, my book sales did increase. Instagram helped me find reviewers who wrote lovely posts about my two mystery novels. Unfortunately, these socials are fraught, once again, with politics, and I'm ready to exit this highway to nowhere.
Plus I think it's ruined a generation of young minds and our collective society.
There. I said it. Without social media, all the Big Crazy (what I call the monster we've collectively created) would have no place to spew its venom, to spread its lies, to stew in its own acidic juices while somehow getting meaner and stronger for it, ruining any hope of factual and polite public discourse again.
I hope they all fail.
Do I feel any empathy for the influencers and creatives and artists and crafters who use social media to make money? Yes, actually. I do. It was a cool new way to make a gig income, or even a full-blown massive one, but can you say we weren't warned? Were we just hoping against hope nothing would change? Ever?
The thing about our current tech-driven life is that change happens faster and faster. What's in one year is out the next. It's not like social media arrived in a vacuum. It disrupted older industries. People used to make money writing for magazines and newspapers. Remember those? The quaint things that arrived in the mail and had a crisp turning sound when you went to the next page?
Print media began a slow decline and then took a big tumble as social media gained traction. In fact, I had just broken into the paying confession magazine market (with a 98-year history, btw), when the confessions suddenly folded and were gone. My very new source of writing income evaporated after I sold only four stories to them. Did anyone weep for me? For the other short story writers who used to make a good, steady income selling to that market?
It wasn't just writers, either. Other people once made money buying and selling ads in those publications. Others earned salaries editing, copy-editing, proofreading, typesetting, and printing them. Stores sold them. Every newspaper that died or cut way back, every magazine that disappeared, represented loss of income for creators and production people and retailers.
So, I have to ask myself, did influencers and BookTok celebs mourn for all of those people who lost their livelihoods when the new platforms left print in the dust? Did they even spare those people a thought?
I doubt it.
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