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For authors, social media is a powerful tool for self-promotion. It also causes burnout.

Published

2 months ago

October 15, 2023

For authors, social media is a powerful tool for self-promotion. It also causes burnout.

Authors can no longer succeed in their craft by writing alone. They must embody multiple roles: writers, publicists, digital marketers, and social media managers. They must be rabid in their self-promotion and steadfast in their personal branding. They have to produce viral tweets, create viral TikTok videos, and optimize their Instagram accounts so that they can get paid to do the work they want to do.

In 2023, writing a book is the easy part.

That’s not to say that self-promotional branding is a novel concept for writers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, authors pulled off some wild stunts to build their brands in newspaper column inches. In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf went shopping with Vogue. Ernest Hemingway did photo ops on safaris and fishing trips. John Steinbeck posed for beer ads. And beyond that kind of classic self-branding, promotion in the 1900s involved a significant amount of personal networking. Anne Sexton, for instance, became a literary star not only because she was an exceptional poet, but also because she was the daughter and wife of salesmen and excellent at self-promotion, as Joy Lanzendorfer pointed out in LitHub. Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, tried aggressively to get her work seen. She was ambitious, sending her poems to dozens of publications at a time and hunting down poets she admired, flirting with them, and then demanding they mentor her.

Today, that kind of branding and gumption is still necessary. According to a 2018 study from Paul Ingram of Columbia Business School and Mitali Banerjee of HEC Paris, “artists with a large and diverse network of contacts were most likely to be famous, regardless of how creative their art was.” Now, as our ability to connect with people across the world deepens thanks to social media, writers and artists are held to an even higher standard of networking and connection. This can, of course, be a good thing. In the early 1900s, many people — particularly women, people of color, and those who earn less — weren’t allowed in the same rooms as the successful artists of their day, ensuring their success would be limited by the connections they could make. While racism, sexism, and classism still exist online, social media has burned down some walls.

It has also given authors another requirement for success: virality.

In an era where self-promotion and personal branding reign supreme, authors are under immense pressure to have a social media presence in order to establish themselves as successful writers. And for good reason — BookTok has led to a pretty significant increase in sales for some authors who have gone viral on the platform. But this pressure, while potentially beneficial, can also be a terrible sentence.

Take Nate Lemcke. He wrote a book, Manic Pixie Egirl, and took to social media to promote it. Lemcke decided to read and review a book written by a female author every day until his book made it to the New York Times bestseller list. While attempting to use BookTok to pull in readers isn’t a terrible strategy, he was accused of exploiting the community for his own gain.

“You wrote a book about a self-absorbed man who uses and abuses women. And then, to promote it, you… began to talk about books written by women to appeal to those female readers who control this space,” user @michael.laborn said in a response video. “You are exploiting women. You are using female authors to get you book sales.”

Lemke’s book was being throttled with so many one-star reviews on GoodReads that the platform had to put a hold on reviews altogether. If you searched his name on TikTok, dozens of videos would populate calling him out for his overt sexism and being seemingly uninterested in introspection. He reached virality, which was his goal, even if the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. And, when I spoke to him, he didn’t seem to care.

“If it comes to having to start a gender war on BookTok to sell my book, then [that’s] better than being a waiter until I’m 65,” he told Mashable. “Maybe I’m a sociopath to say that.”

Before the TikTok drama, Lemke had sold fewer than 50 copies of his self-published book. In the month following the drama, he sold 3,000 copies.

Authors feel the push to go viral online — even if it goes terribly and reveals the worst parts about yourself, you’ll still sell more books than if you were silent. Of course, ruining your reputation can hurt your relationship with your publisher, but Lemke’s novel was self-published; he didn’t have much to lose.

Social media platforms offer writers a direct line of communication with their audience, allowing authors to better understand their readers and create a sense of community. In an age where readers often crave personal connections with authors, social media has become a critical tool for building and maintaining these relationships (thanks, John Green).

“Having that social media presence can bring in more fans and get your work noticed more, so there’s always that push to be noticed, to have that hope for that viral moment,” Andrea Stewart, the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Drowning Empire trilogy, told Mashable. “There is some pressure from publishers as well.”

Stewart posts on Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, and more platforms just about every day. Her contract didn’t include a social media clause — something that’s become more and more popular among newer writers — but her publisher did send her a social media guide. The guide explains how to post on which social media sites, what kind of content does best on different sites, and when you should post about promotions on Audible or Kindle.

“There’s nothing that they say directly that says you have to be on social media, but the fact is that it is expected,” Stewart said. “It’s this unspoken rule.”

Victoria Aveyard, the New York Times bestselling author of the Red Queen series, also doesn’t have a social media clause in her contract. Still, she posts on Instagram, TikTok, and X/Twitter daily — on top of being on deadline for her newest book.

“I do understand the need, and the benefit [of posting on social media], but it can be extremely overwhelming for an author,” Aveyard told Mashable over email. “Especially debuts, who realize upon selling a book that writing the manuscript was only half the job. Now we have to help sell it! And most of us have no idea how to do that, or where to even start.”

Some authors have language in their contracts that requires them to post and promote their work weekly on Instagram, X/Twitter, and TikTok. These kinds of social media clauses change depending on who the writer, agent, and publisher are, and not everyone has one. However, the requirement to be online adds a great deal of work for the writers. It’s not that social media equates to book sales in a one-to-one ratio. Because, as Stewart says, there just is a limited amount of real-time data.

“We don’t know when we make a post on social media whether or not that’s moving the needle or it’s something that the publisher is doing marketing-wise,” Stewart said. “There’s that vagueness, so you feel like you have to do it because you want to do everything to make your book succeed. That’s part of the package.”

And, as Aveyard said, despite the lack of data, “a good social media presence helps me sell books. It helps my backlist and my frontlist. It helps new readers find my old books and old readers find my new ones.”

However, posting so frequently takes away from writing. Creating videos and posts every single day takes time and creativity — both of which are necessary for writing and can feel limited. You can batch content, sure, but ultimately there’s an aspect of social media that requires you to be online, responding to comments in real-time.

“[Social media] is one million percent a distraction, and I find I have less time to write as I maintain an active social media presence,” Aveyard said. “Maybe I should have a social media manager or someone to help me edit content, but currently it’s just me, and I hope that helps my platforms feel genuine. I tell myself it’s all in service of the job and keeping my books front of mind for readers. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s bullshit.”

The metrics-driven nature of social media can also be disheartening for authors. The pursuit of likes, shares, and followers can sometimes overshadow the true essence of writing — the love for storytelling and the desire to connect with readers on a deeper level. Authors may feel disappointed if their posts do not receive the expected engagement, leading to self-doubt and a sense of inadequacy.

But it’s not all bad. Posting on social media can help authors foster relationships and create communities online with other people who fully understand their struggles.

“I want to keep writing forever and to do that in traditional publishing, I need to keep selling,” Aveyard said. “It’s time-consuming, it’s stressful, but it also gives me some illusion of control in a profession in which I have very little. And frankly, I do enjoy a lot of social media and making content. It helps me connect to my readers, understand what they connect to in my work, and just feel like I’m not alone in my work. If I didn’t enjoy it, I don’t think I would have the audience I do now.”

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30 Quick Ways to Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate [Infographic]

Published

5 hours ago

December 4, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

30 Quick Ways to Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate [Infographic]

Looking to drive more direct conversions from your website listings this holiday season?

The team from Red Website Design share 30 ways to improve your website conversion rate in this infographic.

Here’s the top five from the list:

Include as few fields as possible on forms
Use testimonials
Clearly state product/service benefits
Include subscriber and social media follower counts
Write clear, compelling copy

Check out the infographic for more detail.

A version of this post was first published on the Red Website Design blog.

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With the end of the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, the creator economy is the next frontier for organized labor

Published

12 hours ago

December 4, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

With the end of the Hollywood writers and actors strikes, the creator economy is the next frontier for organized labor

Hollywood writers and actors recently proved that they could go toe-to-toe with powerful media conglomerates. After going on strike in the summer of 2023, they secured better pay, more transparency from streaming services and safeguards from having their work exploited or replaced by artificial intelligence.

But the future of entertainment extends well beyond Hollywood. Social media creators – otherwise known as influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, vloggers and live streamers – entertain and inform a vast portion of the planet.

For the past decade, we’ve mapped the contours and dimensions of the global social media entertainment industry. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these creators struggle to be seen as entertainers worthy of basic labor protections.

Platform policies and government regulations have proved capricious or neglectful. Meanwhile, creators’ bottom-up initiatives to collectively organize have sputtered.

Living on the edge

Industry estimates regarding the size and scale of the creator economy vary. But Citibank estimates there are over 120 million creators, and an April 2023 Goldman Sachs report predicted that the creator economy would double in size, from US$250 billion to $500 billion, by 2027.

According to Forbes, the “Top 50 Creators” altogether have 2.6 billion followers and have hauled in an estimated $700 million in earnings. The list includes MrBeast, who performs stunts and records giveaways, and makeup artist-cum-true crime podcaster Bailey Sarian.

The windfalls earned by these social media stars are the exception, not the norm.

The venture capitalist firm SignalFire estimates that less than 4% of creators make over $100,000 a year, although YouTube-funded research points to a rising middle class of creators who are able to sustain careers with relatively modest followings.

These are the users who find themselves most vulnerable to opaque changes to platform policies and algorithms.

Platforms like to “move fast and break things,” to use Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous expression. And since the creator economy relies on social media platforms to reach audiences, creators’ livelihoods are subject to rapid, iterative changes in platforms’ features, services and agreements.

Yes, various platforms have introduced business opportunities for creators, such as YouTube’s advertising partnership feature or Twitch’s virtual goods store. However, the platforms’ terms of use can flip on a switch. For example, in September 2022, Twitch changed its fee structure. Some streamers who were retaining 70% of all subscription revenue generated from their accounts saw this proportion drop to 50%.

In 2020, TikTok, facing rising competition from YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels, launched its billion-dollar Creator Fund. The fund was supposed to allow creators to get directly paid for their content. Instead, creators complained that every 1,000 views only translated to a few cents. TikTok suspended the fund in November 2023.

Bias as a feature, not a bug

The livelihoods of many fashion, beauty, fitness and food creators depend on deals brokered with brands that want these influencers to promote goods or services to their followers.

Yet throughout the creator economy, people of color and those identifying as LGBTQ+ have encountered bias. Unequal and unfair compensation from brands is a recurring issue, with one 2021 report revealing a pay gap of roughly 30% between white creators and creators of color.

Along with brand biases, platforms can exacerbate systemic bias. Creator scholar Sophie Bishop has demonstrated how nontransparent algorithms can categorize “desirability” among influencers along lines of race, gender, class and sexual orientation.

Then there’s what creator scholar Zoë Glatt calls the “intimacy triple bind”: Marginalized creators are at higher risk of trolling and harassment, they secure lower fees for advertising, and they are expected to divulge more personal details to generate more engagement and revenue.

Couple these precarious conditions with the whims and caprices of volatile online communities that can turn beloved creators into villains in the blink of a text or post, and even the world’s most successful creators live on a precipice of losing their livelihoods.

Food influencer Larry Mcleod, 47, better known on social media as Big Schlim, reviews the restaurant Shellfish Market in Washington, D.C.
Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Rumblings of solidarity

Unlike their counterparts in the legacy media industries, creators have neither taken easily nor well to collective action as they operate from their bedrooms and fight for more eyeballs.

Yet some members of this creator class recognize that the bedroom-boardroom power imbalance is a bottom line matter that requires bottom-up initiative.

The Creators Guild of America, or CGA, which launched in August 2023, is but one of many successors to the original Internet Creators’ Guild, which folded in 2019. Paradoxically, CGA describes itself as a “professional service organization,” not a labor union, yet claims to offer benefits “similar to those offered by unions.”

There are other movements afoot: A group of TikTok creators formed a Discord group in September 2022 to discuss unionizing. There’s also the Twitch Unity Guild, a program launched in December 2022 for networking, development and celebration and includes a dedicated Discord space. In response to the rampant bias in influencer marketing, creator-led firms like “F–k You Pay Me ” are demanding greater fairness, transparency and accountability from brands and advertisers.

Twitch streamers are already seeing some of their organizing efforts pay off. In June 2023, after a year of repeated changes in streamer fees and brand deals, the company capitulated in response to the backlash of their top streamers threatening to leave.

None of these initiatives has yet attained the legal status of unions such as the Writers Guild of America. Meanwhile, efforts by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to recruit creators have proved limited. Legal scholar Sara Shiffman has written about how SAG-AFTRA provides creators with health and retirement benefits, but offers no resources to ensure fair and equitable compensation from platforms or advertisers. Nonetheless, while on strike, SAG-AFTRA threatened creators that partnered with studios with a lifetime ban from joining the union.

And despite these bottom-up efforts, the tech behemoths refuse to recognize creators’ fledgling organizations. When a union for YouTubers formed in Germany in 2018, YouTube refused to negotiate with it. Nonetheless, you’ll see companies trot out their biggest stars when they find themselves under regulatory scrutiny. That’s what happened when TikTok sponsored creators to lobby politicians who were debating banning the platform.

People of all races and ages pose holding signs that read 'Keep TikTok' and 'My small business thrives on TikTok.' — TikTok creators gather outside the U.S. Capitol to voice their opposition to a potential ban on the app, highlighting the platform’s impact on their livelihoods.
Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

An invisible class of labor

Meanwhile, most governments have failed to provide support for – or even recognition of – creator rights.

Within the U.S., creators “barely exist” in official records, as technology reporters Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz recently pointed out in The Washington Post. The U.S. Census Bureau makes no mention of social media as a profession; it is invisible as a distinctive class of labor.

To date, the Federal Trade Commission is the only U.S. agency to introduce regulation tied to the work of creators, and it’s limited to disclosure guidelines for advertising and sponsored content.

Even as the European Union has operated at the forefront of tech and platform policy, creators rate scant mention in the body’s laws. Writing about the EU’s 2022 Digital Services Act, legal scholars Bram Duivendvoorde and Catalina Goanta criticize the EU for leaving “influencer marketing out of the material scope of its specific rules,” a blind spot that they describe as “one of its main pitfalls.”

The success of the 2023 Hollywood strikes could be just the beginning of a larger global movement for creator rights. But in order for this new class of creators to access the full breadth of their economic and human rights – to borrow from the movie “Jaws” – we’re gonna need a bigger boat.

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Paris mayor to stop using ‘global sewer’ X

Published

1 day ago

December 4, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Hidalgo called Twitter a ‘vast global sewer’ – Copyright POOL/AFP Leon Neal

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Monday she was quitting Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, which she described as a “global sewer” and a tool to disrupt democracy.

“I’ve made the decision to leave X,” Hidalgo said in an op-ed in French newspaper Le Monde. “X has in recent years become a weapon of mass destruction of our democracies”, she wrote.

The 64-year-old Socialist, who unsuccessfully stood for the presidency in 2022, joined Twitter as it was then known in 2009 and has been a frequent user of the platform.

She accused X of promoting “misinformation”, “anti-Semitism and racism.”

“The list of abuses is endless”, she added. “This media has become a vast global sewer.”

Since Musk took over Twitter in 2022, a number of high-profile figures said they were leaving the popular social platform, but there has been no mass exodus.

Several politicians including EU industry chief Thierry Breton have announced that they are opening accounts on competing networks in addition to maintaining their presence on X.

The City of Paris account will remain on X, the mayor’s office told AFP.

By contrast, some organisations have taken the plunge, including the US public radio network NPR, or the German anti-discrimination agency.

Hidalgo has regularly faced personal attacks on social media including Twitter, as well as sometimes criticism over the lack of cleanliness and security in Paris.

In the latest furore, she has faced stinging attacks over an October trip to the French Pacific territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia that was not publicised at the time and that she extended with a two-week personal vacation.

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