Category: book marketing

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Social Media Priorities and the Trouble with TikTok

First, a quick update, because you have to eat your meat before you get your pudding.

November was a very productive month for me. I’m flirting with a repetitive strain injury with all the time at the keyboard, but it’s really paying off. I participated in the ProWritingAid Challenge (the replacement for NaNoWriMo) and finished the first draft of my next thriller. It’s about a retired FBI forensic psychiatrist whose past comes back to haunt him. I’m plowing through the second draft now and loving it. More on that in the new year.

This fall, I started up the Vocab Menace Series, putting out videos every day. I LOVE WORDS! I love learning their origins and playing with ideas and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I will continue, but not every day.

Evaluating Social Media

For years, I posted regularly on my writing blog (ChazzWrites.com). That was helpful early in my publishing career. I connected with some wonderful authors and made allies. Eventually, I decided it was best to consolidate my posts on my author blog and only post when I had something new and trenchant to say.

I found that posting everywhere (Bluesky, YouTube, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, TikTok, and the Book of Faces) takes a lot of time. Not all those platforms are worth the energy I invested.

My take on social media is below, but for a view from all angles, read Enshittification by Corey Doctorow.

And this is the link to Mr. Doctorow’s piece on Medium titled Too Big to Care: Enshittification is a Choice.

My impressions of the usefulness of social media platforms (your mileage may vary):

I find the user interface for Bluesky and Threads unfriendly. The people are nice, but the platforms are not where they need to be yet. Discoverability is an opaque enigma wrapped in a burrito of mystery.

YouTube is good. Eventually, YouTube might pay me actual money.

One of the most active content categories on Medium is writing. Put that in your keywords, and people will look. Medium’s interface is cool, but following and connecting with people there is probably more useful than dedicating too much time to post every day. Because they are so alike, I feel similarly about Substack. I’m posting less on Medium now, more on Substack.

I’m not looking for a job or writing business books, so LinkedIn is a waste of time and energy.

I like Instagram. As a news source, I find many of the creators I follow there provide thoughtful commentary.

For the authors out there, BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

As for Facebook, you can have a lot of followers, but your audience is far too throttled. They want you to pay to have your content seen. There are many ways it’s problematic. However, I connect with my inner circle of readers there.

I enjoy Facebook for my fan page and hope they never delete it. That happens sometimes, and when it happens, you probably won’t even know why. As a writer hoping to sell my work, it’s always best for me to have my own platform that can’t be ripped away.

The trouble with TikTok

TikTok has really fallen in terms of usefulness and tone. I used to be addicted to political debates there, but my favorite content creators left the platform. Others are competent, but very repetitive. Mostly, the live debates are angry people talking over each other. (Oh, and don’t forget the racist trolls. Lots of those.)

TikTok is a special case in some ways. BookTok can be great, but is often repetitive, covering the same few books (read: rarely mine). Also, some of the BookTok drama is ridiculous.

I would pursue book promotion there more avidly, but things are about to change for the worse. If you’re a Canadian author, sending review copies to the United States is expensive. To complicate things further for non-American authors, TikTok will soon become a walled garden, for the United States only. The details on that change are muddy, but when that happens, I won’t be able to reach my American readers through that platform. (That’s a shame. Most of my readers are from the United States.)

Conclusions

  1. When my American readers can only see other Americans on TikTok, the platform’s value will plunge even further.
  2. Between the forest of TikTok-friendly language and the suppression of posts meant to appease political actors and the new owners, TT’s once robust foundation will eventually sink into the shifting sands of irrelevancy.
  3. Unless another app rises in TikTok’s stead, the change in ownership will benefit Instagram.
  4. LinkedIn is for business. Not my business, though.
  5. If you post for self-expression alone, enjoy using whatever platform you like.
  6. From a time management perspective, don’t invest too much energy trying to post everywhere. It’s a lot to keep up with, and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
  7. For gaining visibility and leverage social media platforms, follow and engage with people you enjoy.
  8. Authentic engagement has more value than solely sending out signals.
  9. Agents and publishers are obsessed with follower count. They shouldn’t be. Follower count means much less than engagement.
  10. Social media is free to use for book promotion, but you get what you pay for. Author Jason Pargin posts excellent content. He has said that even with all his followers, that work does not translate significantly to a greater readership.
  11. There are plenty of book marketing strategies out there. Some gurus push complicated flow charts of funnels. They all enthuse about newsletters. Some content creators make money from sharing “the newest trick.” The solution to selling books may be going direct, going wide, learning how to advertise (and funding it), keyword optimization, consistent branding, or some combination of all of the above, plus something else. Answers abound, but social media alone surely isn’t the cheap, easy solution.
  12. You can’t make a viral video happen. Others choose that for you. I’ve gone viral once, but only because I made a lot of trolls angry. TikTok hid a lot of the nastiest comments because “the collapsed comments could be detrimental to your mental well-being.” Ha! As if my mental well-being was all that great to begin with! I could see the threats, and I had a peek. I just had to click on them to see the tidal waves of crash-outs.

    My question: If the platform’s AI detects mean messages suggesting harm to me, why doesn’t the platform ban those trolls?

    The hullabaloo hardly mattered in the end. The experience did lower my estimation of my fellow humans, but I didn’t respond to the trolls much. Arguing with fascists who are determined to be idiots is the ultimate waste of time. Always preserve your peace (between the punching Nazis thing, I mean).

    On reaching readers:

All social media platforms suppress your signal to some degree.

To break through all the noise requires time, talent, energy, editing, and savvy marketing. Consistency is paramount, but only if you have the time and energy. As much as I love posting Vocab Menace content, it was cutting into my writing time. To get the next book out, protect that time. Prioritize productivity.

My writing time and energy is paramount to me at present. That much is working. My next thriller will be released early in 2026. That’s a concrete achievement I can measure.

~ REMINDER: Buy your books for Christmas now so you can read them before you wrap them for others. Happy holidays!


FYI: All my work is available on Amazon. Endemic is available everywhere.

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How to Spot a Book Promotion Scam

Every day, another book marketing scammer hits our inbox. Lately, it’s two a day. The basic pitch is almost always the same. It goes like this:

1. We came across our book (Endemic, This Plague of Days, Vengeance Is Hers) and it is…

2. Insert a long, flattering, and flowery description of the book here. There’s enough detail, you’d almost think they read my work. What they’ve actually done is scrape social media and book reviews for their pitch.

3. The pitch is to market my work to their secret group of 2,000 readers or to their book club. Another variation is to act as a book marketing coach with all strategies conveniently provided by ChatGPT. (Sometimes they pretend to be a famous author who loves your books and is eager to pass on the name of their book promoter to help you out.)

Spot a Scammer

The first thing you may notice is that the grammar and syntax miss the mark. The sender’s first language is not English. That alone is not disqualifying, of course, but it’s not a good sign if they intend to market English books for you. When I turned down a chancer, they asked, “Why? Do you think I am scam?” (SIC)

The less sophisticated emails are more generic, and the template they’re using for mass emails is evident. (e.g. “I just ran across your excellent novel <<title of book>> by <<Author>>.)

For some reason, the name of the book promoter is often two feminine first names. Sarah Sally is excited to read and sell your book for you!

Like any author, I need more reviews of my books. Several times, I’ve been approached by someone whose marketing plan would contravene Amazon’s terms of service. So, they get money, and I lose my account and livelihood? Great! For them.

More Tip offs

The salutation says, “Hi Author Robert!”

They have no website and no or very low presence on social media.

Their email is a generic Gmail address. (e.g. bestbookmarketing.au.bookbar.uk@gmail….)

They impersonate a real book marketer from a reputable company, but when you go to the real person, the contact info doesn’t match. When that happens, I let the impersonated person know.

HOT TIP #1: Always research by going to the source directly. Do not click a link within an email.)

In the past couple of days, I’ve received offers for deals on their book promotion for “the festive season.” It’s already December 3. A little late to pull together a helpful book marketing campaign for Christmas, isn’t it?

Some scammers are persistent to the point of aggression, sometimes even harassment. When I ignored one particularly relentless scammer, I suddenly got a one-star rating on my latest book. Can I be sure it was the suitor I rejected? No, but the timing was suspicious, and it hurt because the book has, as yet, so few reviews. After that, instead of ignoring scammers, I opted to reply with a polite but firm, “No, thank you.”

It’s exceedingly rare for authors to get approached for something they didn’t sign up for. Real book promoters simply work with authors who come to them, not the other way around. That stipulated, I have had a few entreaties from real agents, publishers, and book promoters. When that happens, I have to look at them really hard before I can take them seriously. That’s part of the problem.

The Danger

A new one this morning came very close to getting me. The pitch was good, but the sourcing didn’t pass. Anybody (including authors) can plug a prompt into ChatGPT and get the same book marketing advice as the scammers do. These people aren’t adding real value. The trouble authors face is not having the budget to overcome the noise. Getting a signal through to actual readers and reviewers is difficult.

Beyond wastes of time and money and the damage to the environment, these AI scam pitches harbor a deeper danger. They poison our media environment. AI hallucinations and deep fake videos erode trust. With the newest gizmo, Nano Banana, you can’t trust anything you see. I loved images from the James Webb telescope, but stopped sharing them because I couldn’t tell what was real, what was enhanced, and what was fake.

If an honest-to-goodness pitch comes along, it’s become an act of self-defense to treat all information with a skepticism that devolves to easy cynicism. If there’s clear video evidence of a politician doing something heinous, they’ll dismiss it with “It’s just AI!”

Can’t write a book on your own? Flood the zone with prompts to an AI that yields trite, soulless regurgitation.

When you use your media literacy and critical thinking skills, the scammer replies, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lyin’ eyes!”

Writing for a living is hard. Waving away the gnats would be a minor strain were it not for their ubiquity.

HOT TIP #2: When in doubt of a sketchy email, check it out. Writer Beware has a searchable database to check out the names and reputations.

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Author’s Crashing Out is Great Drama (but what can I do?)

You know what authors used to do to promote their work before the internet era? They toiled, mostly in obscurity, and if they were lucky, their publisher put them on tour to bookstores. Lucky ink-stained wretches sometimes got on big media (back when media wasn’t social). Some fiction writers even got on TV!

If you want some more joy in your life, watch old YouTube vids of author nonsense. For instance, here’s the great Truman Capote.

Or witness Norman Mailer versus Gore Vidal!

It’s different now.

The last time a fiction author made it on to a major TV spot was Jon Stewart’s interview with Kurt Vonnegut. He was a great sci-fi author, but he only made it to air because (a) he was about to die, (b) he had a lot of brilliant observations, and (c) he’d just published his non-fiction book, A Man Without a Country.

These days, with our fragmented attention and millions of distractions, authors are pretty much screaming into the darkness. We hope to be heard about our fiction, but our voices are muffled under Reality’s onslaught.

So what do we do now?

When the great exodus from X happened, a plethora of other platforms rose up to compete. Bluesky is fairly popular. I’m on there (@robertchazzchute.bsky.social‬), though I have mixed feelings about its functionality. Thing is, there is no single destination for social media attention.

One commentator suggested a simple solution: Be everywhere. That was well-meaning, but if I were everywhere on social media, when would I have time to write the next book? I can’t be everywhere. I don’t have the bandwidth. Who does?

That said, I need to be available in more places, so I started up on Substack. This move is not about monetization, at least not for a long time. It’s about sharing more, spreading the word to new readers, and curated ubiquity.

I’d probably get more views if I engaged in high drama like Truman and Norman, but I’ll opt for engaging with readers in a more sane way.

Today, on Substack, I wrote about The Terrible Dread. If you dig it, please do subscribe.

https://robertchazzchute.substack.com/subscribe

You’ll also find me on Medium. Plenty of fun to read on my profile here.

Oh, before I go, let’s not forget this scream into the darkness. I just launched Vengeance Is Hers!

This is not a guide for aspiring vigilantes, but it might inspire you!

Welcome to Poeticule Bay, Maine, a village where justice is scarce, and secrets have deadly consequences. When a gay student is brutally attacked and exiled from his home, the police turn a blind eye. Fueled by rage, Molly Jergins launches a relentless campaign against the school bully and his sinister family.

As Molly’s quest for retaliation spirals into chaos, the lines between hero and villain blur. To hunt monsters, must she become the very thing she despises? In the end, will revenge prove the best success?

I WANT TO READ THIS NOW
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Energize Your Writing Life with Attack Mode

Years ago, I went to a one-man show put on by director Kevin Smith. Between the jokes, he talked about taking advantage of opportunities and making good things happen. One key takeaway was the Wayne Gretzky quote: “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” That advice proved timely. It coincided with meeting a harbinger of the future at a writing conference in 2010. The experience set me on the path to founding Ex Parte Press.

That harbinger? She was the first person I’d met who read ebooks exclusively. It was a glimpse of the imminent future. A new market had opened and was rapidly expanding. Growing pains and a gold rush lay dead ahead. I’d written a lot, and now I had a place to put it. Mostly, that meant Amazon.

That writing conference took place in Victoria, BC. The outlier was one of the conference organizers. She introduced me as “Roger” as I was about to perform a reading of a short story. I made a joke of it, beginning with, “You got my name wrong, but by the end of this story, you’ll know who I am and remember it!” Sure, I flirted with being obnoxious, but I was confident in my material. I didn’t just read that story about a fight with my dad over money. I attacked it. The reading was very well-received.

It was fun to meet other writers, pick up some tips, and even make a few allies. The thing I enjoy most about writing conferences is how energizing they are. In April, I’m headed to Toronto for a Writing Day Workshop. There will be lectures and discussions and wonky stuff about the book business. I will meet with four agents that day, and I am so excited.

ATTACK MODE: ACTIVATED

If you are curious about attending a conference, here’s the link.

If you need more motivation, here’s a link to their success stories.

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Don’t chase literary agents. Lure them.

My biggest fans got special t-shirts for Christmas.

Things haven’t gone to plan…yet.

I haven’t caught a virus since before the pandemic. Make that: I hadn’t caught anything since before the pandemic. Masks work, but something slipped through. I had forgotten how miserable a virus can be. I ruled out C-19 and pneumonia, but this virus was merciless and my ears are still plugged!

As a doctor friend of mine said, there’s some nasty smutz going around. It’s been weeks of it for me now. That ruined a family reunion, Christmas, my birthday, New Year’s, and as I write this, my head feels like a concrete block. I felt better for a few days, so I was okay for a family vacation in Cuba. Then the virus hit me again. My wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, got sick, too. However, our kids had a great time, and we did get to spend precious time with them. Best of all, we escaped the polar vortex which swallowed our home on the frozen tundra. The Cuban weather was very agreeable, and I got extra time to read a few books amid all the aggressive napping. (More on the readings tomorrow.)

Moving forward into 2025

My original plan was to publish Vengeance Is Hers next month. However, a couple of things are going on I can’t really get into. What I can say is those variables and opportunities have encouraged me to reach out to a few agent about my next novel. Instead of going straight to hitting publish on my own, I have some agents to engage with. I have a few particular agents in mind because I have heard great things about them. The usual route is to make mass submissions to many agents hoping for a bite. I’m more picky than that, and I have options. If it doesn’t work out after submitting to this select handful of agents, I’ll go forward with my original plans.

The struggle is to make the right connection. We have all heard horror stories that can taint our views of literary agents. I am only moving in this direction now for those reasons I can’t get into and because I have personal recommendations from fellow authors. (I also know one personally from when I worked in publishing in Toronto.) I won’t chase agents. There’s no dignity in that. However, metaphorically flirting and seducing the right agent with my literary wares and making them a business partner appeals to me. I’m looking for someone special. Game on.

2025 will have some interesting challenges.

I have a very dim view of where things are going on the international political scene. I’m sure I’ll delve into that here, too, from time to time. On a personal level, I’m uncharacteristically optimistic. I’m confident in the book and my abilities as a novelist. I’m sure our health will improve with time and treatment. I’m excited to see what i can accomplish professionally this year.

I hope you feel the same way about 2025. Whatever strong winds may press us back, let’s keep sailing.

NOTE TO TRAVELERS: If you’ve never been to Cuba, don’t go for the food. We fled there for the weather. I’m a big fan of palm trees, sunshine, and walking in sugar sand. Despite our illnesses, I don’t regret going. There were a few moments of suffering when I desperately wanted to be home in my own bed, but an extremely rare vacation in the tropics was necessary, and mostly beautiful. This was our second trip to Cuba. While it is special, this trip also reminded me how deeply I appreciate the advantages of my snowy home. I feel so fortunate to live in Canada.

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Is TikTok going away?

TikTok has asked the Supreme Court to block Biden’s law that would drive the app from the American market. The deal was that if the app’s parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it before Jan. 19, TikTok is gone.  (The actual deletion could be delayed until April.)

At least seven million Americans depend on TikTok for income. Will Trump save it? There’s a rich lobbyist working on him, but who knows? The American government cites national security concerns to justify the abolition. In Canada, no government phone is allowed to run the app, but Canadian citizens can still use it.

If the app is deleted from the app store in the United States, its value will certainly plummet for me. Most of my readers are from the United States. If I can’t use TikTok to reach them, I won’t be looking at it much. BookTok has been a great marketing phenomenon for book publishing (at least for some books). Bookstores across the land have Booktok displays that move books. Several times, I’ve become aware of books I would have missed without TikTok influencers informing me of their existence.

The US government refuses to explain the deeper details of why TikTok is a security threat. What bothers me is that all social media platforms collect information from their users. While the CEO of TikTok was advocating for the app in a hearing with a racist senator, Meta was gleefully lobbying for its demise. That’s shifty. If your nonsense alarm is going off, you’re not wrong.

The threat to the platform has led many creators to lose interest in using TikTok. Others are running with it as long as they can, at least to point their followers to their new social media of choice.

What might replace TikTok?

Threads’ user interface is still hard to chew and swallow. Bluesky is increasing in popularity as X spirals. Many users are turning their energies to YouTube. That’s where most creators will go for the platform’s monetization advantages.

A New Hope

Here’s a list of possible alternatives to TikTok, including their pros and cons.

More people are talking about Lemon8, but I’m not convinced yet. There is another app lurking on the horizon, but it won’t even be released until February 2025. I will reserve judgment until we can learn more. None of these platforms has TikTok’s powerful algorithm. I’m hoping TikTok survives somehow, but there is no reason or justice in the world, so…hmph. At least for now, it seems like we’re stuck, doesn’t it?

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Preparing for the Launch of ‘Vengeance Is Hers’: Key Steps

Yesterday, I posted about the long and winding road to publication with Vengeance Is Hers. As I arrange the promotion and marketing for this vigilante justice thriller, there’s much more to do.

Here’s a short list:

  • There are bookmarks and promotional materials to order.
  • I’m toying with painted edges for a special edition hardcover I’d sell directly. I’m not that crafty, but it looks doable.
  • I want to make this an audiobook. That has expensive challenges, but I’ll explore the possibilities.
  • Identify and reach out to potential book reviewers and influencers is another challenge.
  • Setting up promotional giveaways will be on the agenda once I have a publication date.
  • Podcast interviews.
  • Set up advertising to coincide with the promotional campaigns, then more ads beyond that to keep the inertia going.
  • Submission for book awards will be on the agenda.
  • In 2025, I intend to attend book and craft fairs and sell directly that way. Gotta plan ahead for that.
  • The social media push has already begun so someone will be aware it’s coming, and happy to buy, read, and review Vengeance Is Hers.

Did I miss anything? Probably.