Three Uncomfortable Things About Twitter
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I'm not leaving Twitter yet, partly because - with everything else going on in my writing life and personal life - I haven't been able to make time to sit down and think deeply about my social media strategy. (The phrase "social media strategy" itself sounds oddly cynical, like the way I hang around and chat with people about this and that, as a creative with some minor public presence, has to be strategized - but never mind.) It's clear that Twitter is going down the tubes, and it seemed wrong to try to cobble together a post about some other idea instead of talking about what's actually going on in the writing world right now.
I don't have big answers or a grand thesis, but I have several thoughts.
1. Social media is a double edged sword.
I've seen so many marginalized people of all kinds, in recent weeks, lamenting that Twitter is the only place that allowed them to connect with other people like themselves, or to gain attention for creative work that fell outside the mainstream.
(Twitter was never that much of a game changer for me personally, but it was consistently a place where I could connect with more fans and draw attention to more works than I could have otherwise.)
Twitter was also a hotbed of harassment, conspiracy theories, dogpiling, and misinformation. Marginalized people were hit with this worst. The bigger a marginalized person's account was - that is to say, the more benefit they were gaining from the platform - the more of this behavior they were exposed to.
Elon Musk didn't invent this problem, but it seems like he's about to make it a lot worse.
Like so many things, this is both/and, not either/or. Twitter had big benefits for many who deserved them and high costs for many as well.
2. Social media is kind of exhausting
It always takes me a long time to get settled on a new social media platform. When I first joined Twitter, nearly 15 years ago now, I lurked for a very long time - years! - before I started regularly tweeting.
When I first started an author blog, back in the days of Livejournal, I could barely do it. It was exquisitely uncomfortable to figure out what statements about myself felt safe and appropriate and beneficial to send out into the void. When I did post, a lot of my early posts were cringe. (For instance, I had a gimmick where I talked about myself in third person all the time.)
It's taken me a long time to get to the point where I actually can write nuanced personal posts every week - and even now, sometimes the task is daunting. Sometimes I have to sit myself down and go "look, your Substack is demonstrably making you X number of dollars, don't screw this up."
Writing for social media is not the same as writing fiction. It’s a different set of skills to build, and each platform requires a slightly different set.
And social media is constantly changing because tech is constantly changing. There's no way around this short of uprooting the entire tech economy. But for people like me who are slower than others at adapting to change, each change has a measurable cost.
I look at my writer friends who are quickly adapting to new places like Mastodon, and I'm happy for them, but part of what's slowing me down is the knowledge that, even if I did gather the spoons to jump onto the next big thing, it would take me forever to figure out how that next thing is going to work for me. I'm already behind; I'm not even really properly managing some of my existing accounts. This is how I always am with social media. It's very easy to get discouraged.
3. It should not be an author's job to "build buzz"
One of the big advantages of a place like Twitter is that it connects authors with a potentially large audience. It gives them space to market their books. This works very well for some authors - especially those who are naturally skilled with social media, but who are less likely to be given splashy publicity treatment by a publisher.
For most authors, though, it's a bit of a lie.
Most of us, bringing all our skills to bear with all the time and spoons we have for social media, can only attract a very modest number of fans to buy our work. Most of us would be better served by a publishing system where the work of building buzz and attracting fans is done by a publicist, not by the authors themselves.
This is not because authors just can't be bothered, or because we'd rather spend our time writing books, although many of us would. It's because most authors are not well positioned to do this work at all. Most of us don't have training in how to use social media effectively, and even when we are trained and informed - which takes time, energy - we still don't have the resources that a large or midsize press's publicist will have. Publicists have pre-existing connections within the industry, pre-existing pools of fans who admire (some or all of) the publisher's work, and an economy of scale where they can connect together books by different authors and promote them all at once. They also have an experience with the industry that helps them find the groups of fans (with interests in a specific genre, theme, or type of character) that are a good fit for a given book, because they’ve marketed books to those fans before. And, of course, publicists at big publishers are able to liase with big bookstores in a way that most individual authors can’t. Individual authors aren't as well-provisioned.
This Substack isn't going anywhere, but if Twitter fails, I think I'm not longing for yet another new place to chat with people. I think what I'm longing for is an ecosystem where all I have to do is keep my website updated, write this newsletter, and keep the appointments that my publicist makes; where the rest of it, all of the exhausting effort of going out in the world and trying to drum up enthusiasm when there are a thousand other people who want and deserve the enthusiasm just as much, is someone else's job.
But of course an ecosystem like this wouldn't solve the systemic issues with publishing. It wouldn't solve anything at all for self-published authors, who inherently have to do their own publicity. It also wouldn't help for authors at very small presses, which may have publicists but which do not have the depth and breadth of resources that a large or midsize press can provide. And the question of who gets published at these large and midsized presses - as well as the question of who gets the bulk of their publicists' attention - is of course inherently tilted towards privilege.
I don't have any solutions here, in other words. I'm just tired.
Meanwhile:
I support the workers at HarperCollins who are going on strike.
This Sunday, I’ll be appearing at TBRcon 2023’s panel on Robots and AI. See you there!
I read my poem “Google Glasses” at The Sprawl Magazine’s virtual launch party; if you missed it, you can watch the recording here on YouTube.
You can also hear me read my Rhysling Award-nominated poem, “Epilogue: Memento Mori” as part of the SFPA’s 2022 Rhysling Nominee Reading Series. (Congratulations to the Long Form winners!)
THE INFINITE appears on Library Journal’s list of top anticipated SFF books of early 2023.