1,612 words
9 minutes read time
I don’t hate social media. In fact, I enjoy it a lot. I like to scroll Threads for current events and book, or writing community, news. Although, I limit how many platforms I’m willing to spend my time on, and I don’t always jump on the new thing. For example, I claimed my username on BlueSky but I don’t scroll or post there. I don’t have it on my phone. I haven’t done anything with UpScrolled. Or Mastodon. Or Tumblr (honestly, I don’t even know what Tumblr is), and most everything else that’s out there. Reddit. I have an account there (I give my reader magnet away on a free book subreddit) but I don’t have the app on my phone and don’t regularly spend time reading and/or posting there.
I update my personal Facebook profile maybe twice a month, if that, and that could be just me sharing a post or joke I liked. Half my “friends” aren’t really friends anyway, and I should just clear them out. They don’t care what I’m doing. My Facebook author page fares a bit better, but not by much. I try to keep it updated so that if a reader lands there, they can see that I do post and I do have books coming out. A dead Facebook author page could say more than “This author hates social media” so if I’m going to keep it up, I know I should keep it up to date.
I also post sporadically on Instagram, and I’m trying to do more there because it seems like the most friendly in regard to posting book content. I boost posts every now and then and for the first time in many years I have over 500 followers. That was a big accomplishment for me, especially since after leaving Twitter, a huge following seems like a thing of the past. When I left Twitter, I walked away from 13.5k followers (and 2k accounts that had mine blocked LOL). Just because of how little time I put into social media these days, that was probably my “peak,” and because having that many followers didn’t sell books, I didn’t mind leaving that account behind.
I thought I was doing pretty good on Instagram, but then they sent me my January insights, and I regret to say that I posted only four times in the whole month. I can probably do better.
So, I can say that I do like social media. I scroll Threads a lot and I added Substack to my phone, even though I don’t plan to blog or post there. It’s a place where I can get book news without the state of the United States thrown in and I like reading longer-form posts because lately that’s where the real news is.
What I have a problem with is engagement. Not getting it, because for as little as I post, I do get some. Responding to it. If someone tags me on Threads or Instagram or maybe replies to a post on my Facebook author page, I’ll see it, because my phone is attached to my body like almost everyone else’s, but I don’t respond right away. I catalog the tag or response, remember it, and don’t acknowledge for days or even weeks after. That . . . isn’t good. Not that everyone expects to have an instant answer–some of us watch TV without our phones or have jobs where we can’t be online–but it doesn’t look charming or mysterious (even though I’d like to think so). It looks rude. It looks rude not to return someone else’s energy. It’s rude not to acknowledge that they were thinking about me and gave me their time.
That’s the struggle I have, and I’ve been this way for as long as I’ve been active on social media in the book community. On Twitter, I’d answer all my notifications once a week, and when people saw that I was online, they answered my responses and I was stuck for hours. And I don’t want to say “stuck” like it’s a bad thing. I had lots of friends that I truly enjoyed talking to, but writing, even as far back as 2015 when I was writing my fantasy books that I would never publish, always came first. That doesn’t happen anymore. Nowadays I trade actual emails or DMs with a friend or two, sometimes what will be all-day chat if I have the time between errands and chores. I don’t get as many notifications on Threads as I used to on Twitter, mostly because I don’t post on Threads very often and the writing community there isn’t the same as what Twitter used to be.
There’s something strange, I think, to be told that someone is reading one of my books, stranger still for someone to tag me in a post and say they enjoyed it. Not odd in the fact that happens, but odd in the way I perceive it, and I wonder if this comes from not having confidence in my books. I’m proud of them, and I know I wrote them as well as I could for that time of my life. Someone on Instagram just tagged me in a post that said she was re-reading an old third person book of mine. A re-read implies she liked it enough to read it again, and of course I don’t want to say anything bad about that book because that would insult her taste. I’ve re-edited it a couple of times since I published it, but I feel like the plot is flimsy and a reader has to suspend their belief quite a bit–especially since what’s been happening recently with police activity and social media. It was just one of those books that I didn’t think through because I was so damned happy writing it. I replied back thanking her, because there wasn’t anything else I could do, and I am thankful and humbled she read anything I wrote, took time to make a graphic and add my name and book title to it, and tag me when she posted it.
I don’t mind putting myself out there–I do it here every Monday on this blog. Sometimes I get comments, and I take just as long to reply. Sometimes I see my blog posts out in the wild, like once I saw someone post my Canva tutorial in a Facebook group I’m in. That was surreal because I responded as well, just a watered-down version of the instructions she was asking for (most groups think it’s bad manners to self-rec). I can see in my referrers where some of my traffic comes from, and I tracked down a couple of people who shared my posts on Threads. I didn’t respond to those because I feel like that’s intruding on reader territory and I never want people to be afraid to talk about me or disagree with me. I’m a big girl and like discussion. I’m always open to learning and hearing other people’s opinions. I also have kind of a snarky sense of humor and not everyone can tell when I’m trying to be funny, so they don’t always take my blog posts in the spirit in which they’re meant. I could defend myself when that happens, but there’s really no point to that.
You would think then, that if I have such a terrible time responding to people, that I would just not post anymore, but I have to get over the uncomfortable feelings I get when people reach out. I don’t know why I wait to respond, especially since it wouldn’t take more than a minute when I see the notification on my phone. I don’t want people to be hurt or think they did the wrong thing. Also, sharing their content gives me content and my four times a month posting schedule on Instagram proves I could use more of it.
I think, overall, at the risk of sounding like Al, that I work quietly, and besides writing about my updates here, I don’t talk a lot about my process or how much I get done. I don’t post word counts or any kind of progress like that–not where fiction readers can see it. The posts that are about my books require a different kind of creative brain and when I open up Canva, I usually have no idea what to make. I have several books to choose from, but I just never know what kind of post to create. A snippet post? A one-liner? Then what background to choose? A character sketch? A video? A carousel? I mean, all of them at some point, obviously, but I get sucked into the technicalities and just go back to what I really want to do: write.
So, yeah, I have a complicated relationship with social media. I’ve made a lot of resolutions in the past, but I can never stick with anything. I don’t depend on social media for sales, which is a good thing, I think, since it cuts out the desperate urgency of having to post, but I admit that it could help me too, if I could commit.
I need to try harder to have better response times on social media and reach out to people who reach out to me first. I like social media, but that doesn’t mean I want to participate.
And lurking is okay, but I can’t be so content in the shadows that I can’t step into the light.
Because, after all, that’s what social media is for.
My readers and characters will thank me.
Vania Margene Rheault 