"Twitter's dead, Facebook’s garbage, TikTok’s sus, and everyone’s scattered. How on Earth am I supposed to promote my book online?"

Digital strategy for an eshittified age.

“Is it worth trying to rebuild a social platform post-Twitter?”

One of my clients asked me this yesterday, but I’m sure she’s not the only one wondering. After all, my list skews toward journalists, cultural critics, popular historians, activists, and comedians—that is, the sort of people who used to be big on Twitter.

…Used to be. My client list does not skew toward ketamine-addled authoritarian lunacy, however, so not many of the authors I represent are big on “X” now, if they’re still on it at all.

That’s fine. As I’ve mentioned on here before, Twitter was never all that great for book promo anyway—even before Apartheid Clyde took over. The vast majority of authors I knew saw conversion rates in the <1% range—as in, less than one percent of their Twitter followers ended up buying their books.

Still, Twitter was at least helpful for some things: getting on journalists’ radar; building a literary network; honing a quippy voice. And for a few early-ish adopters—Duchess Goldblatt, Jonny Sun, and the like—it was a genuine career-maker: a place where a standout non-psychotic personality could amass a large, loyal readership willing to buy books down the line.

Not anymore. Twitter is now the Pripyat of online villages: you really don’t want to go in there without PPE, and you’re almost certainly not going to meet anyone helpful if you do.

But where can you meet those people?

Lord only knows!

Are they buried like Pompeiians under the pyroclastic slop of Facebook, hiding with your Boomer uncle in a rapidly de-oxygenating air pocket? Are they cringing on Instagram between your politically oblivious high school classmate and a weird GenAI baby fashion show? Are they on Threads with the other 2010s girlbosses, monologuing into the void like the ghosts in Dantean Hell?

Perhaps they’re dancing away on TikTok, willfully ignoring the lights that just came on and the ominous-looking earpiece goons who’ve filled the room. Or they’re vomiting from dread with all the other progressives on Bluesky.

Or worst of all: they’re on LinkedIn, Ranch of Human Mediocrity.

…Yeah, social media is crap these days.

Worse, it’s balkanized. There’s no one place everyone uses anymore, let alone a place everyone trusts or even tolerates.

How on Earth do you sell yourself in a landscape like this? On the off chance you’re able to attract followers on any one of these miserable platforms, will any of them actually care enough to buy your book?

Is it even worthwhile to try?

My answer is yes—yes, I think social media is worth trying, at least for most of you.

It definitely is worthwhile if you’re writing narrative nonfiction: journalism, history, memoir, science, that kind of thing.

Market conditions in narrative nonfiction being what they are, you do not want to pass up on even potentially effective avenues of self-promotion if you want a shot at a commercial book deal (and solid sales beyond that).

If you’re a specialist writing something prescriptive, or if you’re a novelist…meh, I don’t know, it depends, maybe it’s worth it, maybe not. I can’t tell you for sure.

What I can say is that if you’re the sort of author who found social media professionally helpful in the past—or if you have a clear vision of how it might have helped you, had you only started 2+ years ago—there’s no reason it can’t be just as helpful today.

You just have to be a lot more strategic with your choices, is all. This is not an era for throwing spaghetti at the wall, if that ever existed. (Maybe in like 2006?)

Here’s what I recommend: