By Kyle Ticali
If you’re a writer, stop me if you’ve heard this before: “You have to have a social media presence.” It’s advice that has become ubiquitous in the digital age for anyone wanting to be published. And it isn’t just us! From freelance artists and restaurateurs, to hairdressers and even pool cleaners; everyone is logging on and busking for change.
How many of us actually post our way into the future that we covet, though? While examples of purportedly “rags to riches” internet fame may fill your head with notions of breakout success, the reality is far different for most writers. Yet, somehow, “you have to have a social media presence” persists. But not all advice, however pervasive, is for all people in all contexts. At best, this push to habitually post on social media has probably been holding you back at what it is you’re supposed to be doing in the first place: writing. At worst, the rise of social media has inhibited your audience.
In May of 2023, a Twitter user by the name of Bigolas Dickolas WoIfwood tweeted a call for their followers to read This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The tweet went viral, and the then 4 year old novel rocketed back up the bestsellers list. Charli D’Amelio, the number two most followed account on TikTok in January 2025, parlayed the popularity of her dance videos into winning TV’s Dancing With the Stars in 2022. She’s now playing the titular lead in the popular Broadway musical, & Juliet. In 2013, David F. Sandberg began posting short films on YouTube under the pseudonym “Ponysmasher”. He has now directed four feature films with theatrical releases, with an adaptation of a popular video game, Until Dawn, scheduled to be released in the Spring of 2025.
Everyone who has “made it” has their own success story – or, rather, what we perceive as a success story. What we may fail to do is approach these comforting narratives with context. David F. Sandberg began in animation, interned at Film i Jönköping, and worked on their documentaries for 7 years before his YouTube channel took off. Charli D’Amelio, the daughter of a wealthy business owner and political candidate, was a competitive and professional dancer for 10 years before joining TikTok. At the time of their boosted sales, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone each had twitter accounts where they promoted their work, yet their own social media presence didn’t garner this attention, it was a Trigun stan account with no affiliation to them whatsoever. Mr. Dickolas WoIfwood didn’t even @ them in his tweet.
Perhaps I ought to breeze through a few more to emphasize my point. Evan Puschak has posted video essays under the YouTube moniker “Nerdwriter1” since 2011, gaining him a publishing deal for his book, Escape Into Meaning. The book, unfortunately, never appeared on any best sellers lists. Addison Rae rose to fame lip syncing on TikTok in 2019; in 2021 she signed a publishing deal with Sandlot Records and released her debut single, “Obsessed.” That single was critically panned, and she has not as yet broken the top 50 in the Billboard Hot 100. Jake Paul has transmuted his Vine following into a YouTube channel, and then into a career punching old men for sport. Professional achievements, certainly, but you’d have to squint to see them as unmitigated triumphs. It appears there’s more to it than just having a following.
There’s also a recurring theme, here, of classically trained, wealthy, or otherwise experienced individuals increasing their fame (or notoriety) via social media. These aren’t exactly the rags-to-riches, zero-to-hero fairy tales that we tell ourselves. Those who do start from nothing don’t seem to get very far, or, at least, not as far as their privileged peers, both on social media and traditional media. Sean Evans, for example, is by now nearly a household name for his 10 year running internet interview show, Hot Ones, and yet has a net worth of approximately 62 million dollars less than America’s least favorite late-night giggler, Jimmy Fallon, despite averaging more viewers by at least a million.
This brings us to the point that, yes, of course there are unambiguous examples of social media making someone a contender. The universe is a big pinball machine and anything can happen given enough quarters. Using Bluesky to become successful isn’t impossible, but the question remains: Is it more or less possible than the countless waiters in Los Angeles hoping to be discovered by a famished producer who likes the cut of their jib and thinks they have the right stuff?
It depends on how you define success. For me, success is achieving the goal of making something qualitative that people appreciate and hold dear. For others, it might just be getting rich and/or famous. If your definition of success is more akin to the latter, sure, I can see why you’d want to log-in every day. Although, we have a term for a compulsion to pursue fortune despite harm and negative consequences to the pursuer – it’s called a gambling addiction.
It bears repeating that using social media results in a high that is similar to ones produced by gambling or doing drugs. When a larger account retweets your nuclear take about what color some dress is, watching the numbers go up triggers the reward centers of your brain, flooding your neurochemistry with dopamine, which makes you feel pleasure and ensures that you’ll want to come back for more. Developers know this, of course (practically everyone knows this by now, whether they’d like to admit it or not) and they deliberately build social media platforms to be maximally addictive. Infinite scrolling, variable rewards, push notifications, personalized algorithms, gamified elements such as badges, tags, and trophies – these aren’t implemented because of how functional and user-friendly they are, they’re engineered to make you jones.
Not only is it neurologically identical to gambling, but it is worsening (and maybe causing) your mental health decline. We are all of us battling with how it affects our attention span and self-image, but when it comes to social media use and overall screen time on smartphones, adolescents are most at risk. Their developing brains and sense of identity are far more malleable to external force; they isolate themselves with strangers, develop emotionally dysregulated and aggressive traits. It used to be that kids fantasized about becoming athletes or pop-stars to escape their hometown and make something of themselves, but now they want to lip-sync and dance on TikTok. A 2019 survey found that 86% of American children were aspiring to become social media influencers. Many analysts concur that one would need at least a million followers to make it a full time career, yet less than 1% of people who attempt ever do.
I don’t mention all of this to inspire panic or to suggest that anyone wholly abstain from social media, which would be a lofty goal in and of itself; no one can turn back the wheel of innovation, and these platforms are here to stay. Furthermore, it isn’t the purview of this article to encourage anyone to reduce their usage, although it’s perhaps something you should consider. No, I outline just a few of the harmful impacts of social media habits to emphasize why it is not and can not be considered the one true path to modern day prosperity, and the conventional wisdom of informing young creatives that they must have a social media presence to succeed must be dragged into the street and shot dead. It’s not only demonstrably incorrect, it’s fundamentally hurting people.
“I think it depends on your field,” a self-published author told me. “I’m a romance novelist, and I once made a TikTok about the plot of my book that was so silly, I sold 300 books in a couple of weeks.” This author, who will remain nameless, has 12 novels on their Goodreads page, all published between 2019 and 2024. They average 20 ratings per book on that platform, but most of their novels have 5 or fewer. Their Amazon page lists 7 novels rather than 12, but averages only 15 ratings per book. You might wonder, as I did, how many proud friends and relations are responsible for these ratings. In any event, 4 out of 7 of those books listed on Amazon are completely free with Kindle Unlimited; a common tactic in self-publishing. None are more than $10. If what they say is indeed true, I wonder if those 300 copies sold weren’t trivially inexpensive, if not free, but more importantly: I wonder if any of those copies were ever even read.
Statistically speaking, traditionally published novels are expected to only ever sell 3,000 books in their lifetime. Self-published books only sell 250. Most of these sales occur in the first year of publishing and taper off dramatically after that. If that amount of copies fly off the digital sales in the first few months of publication, but then not a single one ever sells again, what have you won? Especially if it was free with a Kindle unlimited account; you can’t even pay your rent that month. There are more reliable metrics of a book’s success than how many copies it sold due to a frivolous TikTok and how much online clout that affords you. How many loyal readers did you convert?
Relying on social media to promote your work is akin to playing the scratch-off to get out of poverty. You’re astronomically more likely to either win absolutely zilch or just enough cash to bank-roll the next ticket, which you will likely lose your shirt on. The likelihood of your winning even the mid-level prize, let alone the grand prize, might as well be the chances of stumbling on D.B. Cooper’s remains and making off with his bag of money. The only people who profit from the insistence that a social media account is necessary to achieve your dreams of being a creative are the CEOs who built them and need as many dedicated users as possible to make their app valuable to investors.
Of course, it does depend on your field – that much is true. In the way that “show, don’t tell” was decent advice for a scriptwriter, but remains terrible advice for a novelist, flagrant self-promotion on socials is wrongfully touted as the universal answer to career anonymity. What muddles the waters is that it can produce somewhat better results if one lowers their expectations and has very specific goals that, most importantly, align with the platform they’re using. Tattoo artists may gain some esteem by showing off a photo-realistic Spongebob Squarepants inked onto a tastefully presented buttcheek. Barbers could perhaps increase their clientele with a low-fi ASMR experience of their coveted VIP treatment. Instagram models are only required to look scrumptious and sip from trendy cups. The visual arts will always be king on the internet.
That’s what advertising is, historically speaking: The act of showing someone what you do and trusting that they’ll want more of it. Andy Weir’s breakout success, The Martian, which, as of 2017, had sold over 3 million copies, started as a serial posted chapter by chapter on his own blog before it was self-published on the burgeoning Kindle and eventually picked up by an imprint of Penguin Random House. When Lindsay Ellis pivoted from 12 years of YouTube film criticism to novel writing, she had already won a Hugo award for her two part documentary autopsying Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien’s books, and had already established her authorial voice. Before Kelsey Dionne kickstarted her tabletop role-playing game, Shadowdark, for $1.3 million, she was releasing 6 years of Dungeons and Dragons adventures via her newsletter, The Arcane Library. In fact, many indie TTRPG creators espouse the merits of newsletters over social media, including Ben Milton of Questing Beast and his own successful game, Knave. As of the time of this writing, Andrew Rea of Binging with Babish fame has not dropped a country single featuring the musical stylings of Jelly Roll; he’s expanded his offerings of cooking content on YouTube and beyond. Not one of them spontaneously combusted with fame live-tweeting House of the Dragon.
In February of 2024, Vox published an article, Everyone’s a sellout now, which tells the story of a nonfiction author, pitching her next book, who was told by an editor of a Big Five publishing house that she did not have a sizable enough online following in order for them to bite on the project. In December of that year, screenshots of the article were being circulated on social media, asking the question, “What do publishers even do anymore?” This eventually led to discourse about book piracy and Napster, which is a common boogeyman told to aspiring authors at bedtime, even though there’s conflicting opinions on how much piracy actually affects book sales. If it’s true that traditional publishers don’t promote the authors that they service anymore, and instead expect the authors themselves to do their own self-marketing on social media, I’d ask where they got the idea to do that? The question is rhetorical: We gave it to them. Every single author on Earth, aspiring and professional, has been logged onto Twitter vying for higher follower counts since as early as 2010, because we told each other that it was the unequivocal path to success. Now we’re upset that the money people agree.
Even award winning musicians like Halsey are being pushed by record labels to promote on social media. In 2022, Columbia Records refused to allow them to release music from their new album, The Great Impersonator, unless they built a viral marketing campaign around it. “Everything is marketing. And they are doing this to every artist these days,” they wrote on TikTok, acquiescing to the demands. “I just want to release music, man. And I deserve better tbh. I’m tired.” Halsey’s 2020 album, Manic, sold over 2 million copies without the help of any TikTok campaigns.
For books, it hasn’t seemed to help either. Barring international pandemics, book sales have remained mostly constant since 2004, with negligible fluctuations. E-book sales peaked in 2013, but have since declined and similarly leveled out. Any insistence that social media is sustaining book sales or readership is based on short term memory. It’s difficult to find numbers from before 2004, but from what I can tell, in the 1990s, print book sales were in the billions. During the pandemic, in 2021, sales reached 843 million (and have dropped 76 million since), but even if you add the total estimated e-book sales that year, you’d still be somewhere in the range of 168 million less than the time before people averaged 3.5 hours a day on their phones scrolling booktok for reviews of A Throne of Winter and Ash or whatever. In spite of this, the number of books being sold has exploded, more than doubling to 2.3 million new titles released every year.
It’s curious how close the Napster claims are to the truth without actually smoking a cigar; the suggestion that authors must showcase their humanity and beg to not be pirated. It seems more realistic that the reason people feel like they have to grind to get noticed is because the internet has conceived a bounty of options. There has never been more stuff to choose from, and we’re all eager to be chosen.
Not all attention is created equal, however. Addressing a group of 100 highly engaged individuals can often be far more beneficial than shouting unheeded at 1 million habitual scrollers. Discord, Newsletters, Substack, Patreon, even specific subreddits may be a better place to spend your time than the open ocean of Twitter or Bluesky. Anyone can still walk in and stay if they want to, but there’s an occupancy limit before the fire marshal is called. Smaller, niche communities was how the internet began, and they’re on the rise again. The way streaming platforms are reverting to cable packages, so are venture capitalists rediscovering the message board. “It’s not how many followers you have, it’s how many care,” writes Gary Vaynerchuk, co-founder of Resy, an online restaurant-reservation service that rescued Americans from the hellish suffering of having to talk to another human being on the phone for 30 seconds.
The trick is ascertaining which particular platform is most suitable for the kind of aspirations you have for yourself, and then using that soapbox to demonstrate your ability. Whatever it is you do, and whichever platform you select, what you post there ought to be your art; not a facsimile of your art, but your selfsame art exactly. The wider the gulf between the online content and the creations that you’re trying to popularize, the more challenging it will be to make the leap from one to the other. Your tweets are not the art. Your Tumblr discourse is not the art. It isn’t even a comparable matter of apples and oranges; you aren’t going to convince people to eat an apple by giving them a gnawed-on core and a handful of loose pips. My apologies to any authors reading this, but talking about the art is also not the art. Few people want your art as theory rather than as praxis. They want you to show them that it’s something worth wanting.
If you’ll allow an example by way of a brief anecdote, and an admission of hypocrisy: This article is probably not going to serve my ambitions of publishing fiction, because it isn’t fiction. It’s not even about fiction, per se, and so the divorce between ambition and reality is wider than it would be otherwise. The only thing keeping it from distending further is that it’s at least a substantial piece; published to be enjoyed, abhorred, praised and criticised. If it were merely a series of tweets, I would be Van Damme performing a split on the wing mirrors between two backwards moving Volvos.
I’m afraid that there is no magic flare that you can fire into the night sky and be discovered. There’s no shortcut you can take, and no amount of threaded opining that’s going to get you there any faster. Genuinely, 99% of your amassed followers aren’t your ideal audience and they never will be, and that 1% will only ever continue to be so if what you make itself honors their time and attention. If, instead, you’re wasting all of your mental energy and social currency trying to get a number as high as possible, you aren’t making art. You’re drinking watered down vodka tonics at the slot machines.
Modern innovations have changed the landscape of nearly every artistic endeavor and will continue to do so, but the tried-and-true methods, however laborious and potentially heartbreaking, have always and will always remain the same. If you keep your shoulder to the wheel and focus on creating art so beloved or so exemplary of its form that it cannot remain denied, reward is only an eventuality. The hard pill to swallow is that not everyone can or will become a success, measured by sales or worth or notoriety. Everyone can, though, become a success measured by a life spent making beautiful things, rather than one consumed by migrating from one website to another, clicking heart-shaped icons and waiting for a miracle that will likely never come.
