Social Media Author Thoughts
In my previous post, I talked briefly about social media and considerations to make when you post. If you struggle with knowing what to post, think with a reader-first mindset; make posts that are interesting and engaging. Most of all, like you write a thesis statement in an essay, your posts serve to set the argument for why readers will enjoy your book.
Social media isn’t easy for a lot of people for myriad reasons. I do sympathize with the thought that it’s unfair that, on top of all other jobs and obligations, authors have to constantly keep on top of so much marketing; this is true with most (if not all) artistic professions. You have to create a brand, which can sound removed and clinical, but at the end of the day, I want to try to make this process simpler. I would also advise not to try every social media platform at once. Don’t over-commit. Find one that feels comfortable and build a space there.
Ask yourself: Who are you, and who would like your books? Don’t overcomplicate it, and don’t hide from it or act coy. I love horror, fantasy, and romance. This is on pretty much all my bios. I like the intersection of these genres. I like vampires, fallen angels, and Gothic literature. Satan, Mephistopheles, Lestat, Astarion, Dracula, Carmilla, and so on. I like stories with messy and complicated characters, and I like exploring dark themes and experiences.
If you skim through my site, my bios, and my posts, this can seem obvious because it should be; I’m not only making this my “brand,” but I’m appealing to people who like that fiction, too. It’s not a front. This is what I like—but at the end of the day, it’s still curated and focused. What my books are about is clear with one glimpse. I used to be not as intentional with the colors and backgrounds I would use.
Another thing: A trap that I’ve seen since I got a Twitter account in 2013 is that a lot of people will almost exclusively follow, engage with, and make posts for other writers. “Follow 4 Follow” was and is still something a lot of people ascribe to. The issue here is that if you want to move books, networking with other authors and creating relationships is good, but if your posts don’t engage readers, it can be hard to get them to read even one book. It’s important to not just get people to read one book but to get them to recognize your name and know what they’re gonna get—and what they’re gonna get are books that they love!
Also, I know a lot of people come from fandom spaces where you’re all both fans and creators, which creates a collaborative environment for people who are both readers and authors/artists. This is great! And as an author who enjoys reading, it can be hard to completely separate the author and reader spaces completely, even when I’m adamant that authors avoid looking at their book reviews; I never see the reviews for my books unless I’m tagged. It’s not wrong to write content for other authors. Many of my topics here, including in this post, are targeted toward authors. That said, as I mentioned in my previous post and also quite a few times here already (and I’ll probably keep repeating it), when establishing your brand and selling your book, you have to engage in a reader-first mindset.
This is number one when you use social media. It’s okay and even great to engage with other authors in the community, and I would encourage you not to lose your personality and to post about what you love, but don’t forget that your audience is your readers. Your readership may include authors in your niche. I know that I write queer horror and romance and read queer horror and romance. But your focus should, generally, be curious readers who are looking you up.
Pretend you’re a reader who’s seen this book around and is wondering if this is for them. What do you expect to see and hear that makes you put a book on your TBR? What makes you bump books up to top priority on your TBR list?
If you find that you struggle with only gaining engagement from other authors, it’s good to ask yourself what your books offer readers—and it does offer something! Genre can help. If you write romance, they want the characters’ romantic journeys to a happy and satisfying ending. Subgenres matter, too; cozy romance and dark romance will have different aims, aesthetic appeals, and so on.
Now, I’ll go over my thoughts on some of the platforms out there. Even though I have other accounts on platforms such as Facebook, I’m not very active there, so I’m only including places where I post regularly.
Tumblr
I’ve been here for a long time. “No one buys things on Tumblr, so don’t waste your time” is a common refrain.
That said, I want to challenge this idea, but with some caveats. I write dark and Gothic queer romance, and I think this works very well for a Tumblr audience. I’ve found quite a few readers on this site. A lot of the idea that you get no traffic from Tumblr is because tracking links don’t work on the site, so when you try to see where your audience is coming from, you’ll get a giant zero from Tumblr. This leads to people saying no one on Tumblr clicks their links. Read more about it here.
I like Tumblr because even if a post “flops,” there’s a feature called the queue where you can reblog your posts into that, hit Shuffle, and now you have your book posts intermingled with anything else you’ve put in the queue; I once had a queue with up to 800+ posts, mostly reblogs of literature quotes, moody photographs, movie photos, and NBC Hannibal GIFsets. It’s not quite as large anymore, but I can intersperse original posts, and usually, if I post something that no one sees at one time, they’ll see it and like, reblog, and comment on another day. You can also set the number of posts per day and the timeframe for when they post.
Another good thing about Tumblr is that a lot of social media platforms don’t let you easily share links outside of stories (Instagram) or, hell, even there. With Twitter, it seems that tweets with links are suppressed. Tumblr doesn’t have this problem; it’s easy to make posts with multiple links.
It sounds weird saying this as a younger millennial, but Tumblr feels very somewhat older Internet—not the Old Internet, but how the Internet was back in the early 2000s when the top sites I went to in fifth grade were Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal. I think that interconnectivity is important. Links are the Web, after all, and I have a lot of feelings about these platforms that become siloes meant to isolate you and your followers—and all the information we receive—to one spot.
When you’re an author, it’s important to have a location where you can easily share your author site and book links; the harder readers have to look, the less likely they’ll get to the stage where they buy your book. I’ve absolutely been that frustrated reader trying to find the one link that works to buy a book. As I mentioned in my previous post, you need to make things as easy on your reader as possible.
So, I give Tumblr a wary thumbs up because I have issues with the moderation. To say everything I’ve seen on Tumblr that I had issues with would be one of those four-hour video essays. Tumblr has a reputation as the “gay site,” and people seem surprised when I’m cynical about this because “they see gay art on it everywhere.” However, I remember when the NSFW ban was put into effect, all my GIFsets about lesbians (such as from The Handmaiden or The Perfection) would get flagged as NSFW and hidden from the public until I appealed them. These GIFsets had, per Tumblr staff’s parlance, nary a female-presenting nipple in them. I actively avoided sex scenes and graphic nudity, but they immediately gained suspicion. The moderation is not as strict now, but since I’ve been on this site for so long, I know that things can change rapidly, and I’m angry about the sex workers I knew who had to delete their blogs or they got banned.
But if you choose to use Tumblr, what do you post? You can do a basic post introducing yourself and your books. I like web weavings, which I tend to only see on Tumblr because of the ability to upload multiple images to one post. They’re a little unwieldy on other platforms. Basically, a web weaving is a multi-image post of different art and words with a core theme. They mix quotations and art from various sources. Not quite a collage, but a similar premise. Here’s one I did about hauntings. Here’s one I did for The Saint of Heartbreak. My most successful one I made for Providence Girls before it was published. I also like, with both Instagram and Tumblr, doing quote compilations around a theme or word. So, for example, love.
Instagram
I came to Instagram late, and it’s probably my most used platform. I have a business account, but I didn’t immediately get the scheduling feature; it kicked in about six months after my account type changed. I find scheduling very useful for planning ahead and also rearranging and seeing what your group of future photos and reels will “look” like as a grid.
The censorship is not quite as harsh and restrictive as other platforms, although I do know people who’ve gotten posts removed for using words like “horny.” I’ve also heard rumors that they will be harsher going forward into 2025, which I can sadly believe. The moderation can be inconsistent. I tend to censor violence-related words and erotic terms to be safe.
Most of my advice with making Insta posts boils down to, again, what readers would be interested in seeing, book pics and punchy snippets and such. I always go back to conveying what people can expect in a book. That’s most important. I also enjoy doing silly posts. It’s not really something I think about too hard. I’m good at boiling a work down to a catchy line—in another life where I had more self-loathing, I could’ve been a copywriter.
Going back to my concerns about readability, make sure that the contrast between the text and the image is clear; if the text is white, make sure the image is dark enough, so the words are easy to read. If you’re using a light background, ensure that the text is dark enough to be legible. For reels, I try to choose songs that are trending, but not always; I tend to worry more about trending sounds on TikTok.
When it comes to the backgrounds, I currently use stock photos and videos from Pexels, as well as nineteenth-century art by Gustave Doré, William Blake, and the Pre-Raphaelites. I try to avoid using “aesthetic pics” that are uncredited on Pinterest and such; this is something I have failed with in the past, and I strive to be better and more conscious.
Authors, regardless of how they’re published, often want to be respected, which is fair. I get what it’s like to have family and friends in your real life that don’t take writing or even reading seriously. But I think we should then be respectful of all creatives and also, as I spoke about in the last post, readers.
An aside: What I’m about to say applies to other platforms, but I suppose it came to mind here because how our image-focused Instagram is. Respect other artists, and respect your readers. Most creatives put time and hard work into their efforts, and readers give you time and money. You should put care and consideration into everything you do. Sometimes we fail at this, but every day is a new day. It concerns me to see anti-generative AI sentiments from authors who then, very casually, use uncredited art and photography for commercial purposes; I also see this sometimes from authors who are very protective about their own writing being plagiarized or pirated.
If you’re marketing a book with a price tag on it, that’s commercial. If you use someone else’s art, be sure to credit it and ask for permission. I don’t like seeing posts with “credit unknown,” “DM for credit,” or “credit to the artist” where the artist’s name isn’t given. A lot of gimmick accounts (cute animal photos) also do this. We need to normalize giving more credit and respecting the commercial rights of artists—and asking if unsure. If I’m not sure if something is okay, I send an email and wait.
On a similar note, an art commission, no matter how much you paid for it, isn’t the same as something you can use as a cover if it’s not in a contract, and you didn’t pay a commercial fee. When you approach an artist with a commission inquiry, it should always be stated very clearly when you want to use a commission for a book cover or to use in your marketing. Make it clear that it’s a book cover commission inquiry.
“Well, I paid this much money for it, so I’m entitled to use this art however I wish, and the artist has to deal with it.” Horrible attitude, and again, terrible to see from people who, besides wanting more respect themselves, then talk about respecting artists and not using AI. All right. So, Midjourney is wrong for stealing art (and they are—to be clear, yes, they are), but you can? “The artist didn’t say I could, but they didn’t say I couldn’t use the commission for cover art.” That’s not how copyright works, so at the end of the day, you’re taking advantage of an artist who likely doesn’t want to get into a fight.
Twitter
Twitter used to be good. There was a time I would have said Twitter and Instagram were my main author platforms. At this point, however, I think it’s radioactive, and I can’t think of any meaningful tips because engagement has plummeted and what tweets do get seen seems pretty random. Also, when investigating whether LGBT words were censored, we get such gems like this.
So, that’s great. There’s much to talk about when it comes to the fall of Twitter, most of which has already been covered. I also hate the loss of Twitter because, since Tumblr banned explicit content in 2018, a lot of authors and artists of erotic content and a lot of sex workers have to re-establish themselves in a constantly narrowing space.
Bluesky
Admittedly, I’m skeptical about the sites and apps trying to take Twitter’s place. You know, I’ve been on Tumblr for a long time. Back in 2011, I would see people talk about how Tumblr was better than other sites because it had a more progressive base and was therefore less toxic. Well.
Still, I want to be cautiously optimistic. This is a space not owned by Meta like Threads, so there’s more of an allowance for sexual and transgressive posts and art. It feels so new that I can’t say how it does for book sales, and there’s also no scheduling feature yet. That said, for now, I think it’s the best Twitter alternative.
TikTok
I came to TikTok late. Yeah, I do that a lot. Anyway, I see a lot of authors burn out on TikTok; it is very much an app with a strong reader presence, but a lot of authors don’t enjoy posting there. Hell, I took a break from TikTok for a few months this year because when I would post, sometimes the video would do fine while another, not much different, would get...five to ten views, and there was no warning from TikTok and nothing in the TikTok updates that said the video had been disqualified from FYP for being low effort and such. Some suggested a shadowban, but I’m guessing it was a glitch that happens to a lot of people where the video can only be viewed by going to someone’s profile and clicking on it. Sometimes reposting helped, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Besides, TikTok gets unhappy if you try to post and repost too much daily. Either way, it was frustrating, but I returned to TikTok, and it’s been going pretty well.
Still, TikTok is also frustrating because of the amount of words that have to be censored—words like “blood” and “queer.” If you’re writing queer dark and Gothic stories, this can be challenging! Hashtags related to queer books can’t be used—as in #queerbooks was literally banned, and you will get a warning if you use it. I tend to stick to genre hashtags, like #darkromance, #gothicromance, #vampirebooks, etcetera. So far, using the word “sapphic” hasn’t seemed to trip any alarms.
Now, I don’t post daily, but if I do upload a video, I tend to do it in the evening to generally good effect. My main advice here: Keep it simple. Don’t overthink. You don’t need to talk or show your face if you don’t want to.
A lot of readers like book flips (a video where you start at the back of the book, flip to the beginning, and show the cover) and videos where you hold the book where it shows the pages, give a pithy description or a list of tropes, and then show the cover. Don’t spend an hour editing a video unless you really enjoy doing it, and don’t be afraid to reuse the book flip footage, so long as you put a different text and offer something that conveys aspects about the book that readers will enjoy. Also, videos work when they’re dynamic, such as text popping up rather than just being up on the screen all at once.
Again, keep it simple. My videos tend to be between 8–15 seconds long.
The free program I use to edit videos and add filters on my phone is called CapCut. You can pretty easily upload photos and videos to CapCut. Make sure to choose the correct aspect ratio for a TikTok video. It’s also worth it to look at trending sounds.
Despite its overwhelming nature, almost all social media can be understood by studying what appeals to people. Most importantly, think about what would convey to a reader who you are and what your books are about, and stick with that. While consistency matters, don’t burn out. It’s okay to drop one platform or take a break.
At the end of the day, the mercurial nature of a lot of these places—like Twitter—make them unreliable places to put your eggs in one basket, which is often why it’s good to have a website and newsletter before you worry too much about social media. You don’t want to make a platform your number one place to speak with readers, and then it gets bought by Elon Musk.
Be engaged with others, and make your work accessible; though I know I also need to be better on every platform about this, use alt text. Ensure that text on your graphics is big enough and in contrast enough with the background to be read easily. Don’t do burgundy text on a scarlet background, please.
Don’t forget to have fun! While marketing is work, and you should space out your “working on promo” time, I frame it as another outlet for creativity. So:
Be clear and upfront about your genre and aesthetic. Think about color choice.
Always tell the reader what they get out of reading your book; think about what you’re offering them and not what they’re offering you.
Make your posts easy to read.
Have fun!
Hello! I’m Morgan, and I write romance, horror, and fantasy. I enjoy Gothic lit and vampires. My newest book as of typing, The Saint of Heartbreak, a queer romance in Hell about Judas and the Devil, is out now. More about my books can be found at morgandante.com. My Patreon can be found here.