SUBURBAN SYNTAX

I quietly shifted my social media approach over the past six months, and I’m glad I did.

After the release of Revenants last Fall, I had to reevaluate how I was marketing the novel, and myself. For nearly a decade, I was all in on Twitter. It was a great platform to meet and interact with potential fans, acquaintances, and other authors. It helped immensely with getting my short stories in front of readers as well as publishers and literary magazines.

These days, not so much.

Since it became “X”, things have gone downhill. While many users jumped ship almost immediately for personal or political reasons, I was determined to see how it played out and not abandon what was my most successful online platform.

Sadly, X is now useless to me. This is my experience as someone who had a few thousand followers, so YMMV.

The “signal-to-noise” ratio on X has made it a poor choice to sell books. It was never great for direct sales unless you already had celebrity-level reach, but now it’s simply abysmal, and even tweeting just to communicate with my audience felt like shouting into the void. My old, curated lists of accounts I followed were littered with “suggested” accounts and tweets, making it difficult to follow what I wanted. Not to mention numerous authors and publishers leaving for platforms like Instagram and BlueSky.

I’m not deleting X, but effectively abandoning it, hoping one day it may change hands and be resurrected as something better.

Instagram, while not ideal either, has been a better choice in terms of being able to connect with fans and other writers. The integration with Facebook is helpful to an extent, and the ability to express things visually, share art, and link to various topics has been a better experience.

I tried Bluesky briefly, but it seemed extremely quiet, and I wasn’t really able to find many of my former Twitter friends. Part of what makes social media useful is discovering opportunities, both local and online, and IG + Facebook seem to be the best I can do right now. I’m still a proponent of in-person events and working with local businesses to move books and connect with readers, but some online component is essential these days to author marketing.

Oh, and this blog doesn’t hurt either, because you’re still my most engaged audience. 🙂

Are you still on X? Does it work for you? If not, what social media platforms, if any, seem to work for you in this year of our lord 2025?

Let me know down in the comments!