Lost in the Story

My TikTok feed is a mess and by mess I don’t mean it’s negative or showing upsetting content, what I mean is it’s full of crap. AI generated reddit videos, 5 min hack videos and clips from TV shows I’ll never watch and have no interest in watching. There’s no substance to it and there hasn’t been for a while. To me the internet as a whole just feels full of clickbait and content with no passion or care out behind it anymore and I’ve known this for a while but it didn’t really hit home how much I disliked it till it came to my book. 

My book was published in October 2024, and part of me thought that publishing the book would be the hardest part of it all. I thought that when my book went live on my publisher’s website after 3 years of work I could kick my feet up and just relax… but I was wrong. 

Marketing your book so people can find it and buy it requires a lot of work. You need to build up your author platform and to do that you need the internet, more specifically social media. I’ve been a copywriter and I’ve had other jobs that required me to maintain company social media accounts. I knew to some extent what I was getting myself into, but my previous work on social media has mainly been long form content like blog posts and I was naive enough to think that moving over to short form on TikTok would be the same, but boy I was wrong. 

I started posting on TikTok to promote my book and I followed the most recent trends for promoting poems on the platform. Was I mega successful? Well, no.

I was consistent in my posting for a month before my posting trailed off so I can hardly expect to have achieved my goals in such a short period of time. But I did get a few more views and like than I thought I would, a fair few more and if I had carried on as I was I think I could have been well on the way to one day being ‘successful’ on the platform. But I stopped posting (much to the horror of my publisher I’m sure… sorry Becca, I am fixing it). 

So then why did I stop posting if I knew I was on track to get popular as an author, more specially a poet, on the platform? 

In short, what’s popular lacked the human touch. My posts lacked me in them, me the author of the book, me the writer of the poems. 

This isn’t me saying what I was posting wasn’t resonating with people, believe me it was and I am beyond touched by the people who reached out to tell me they found something meaningful in my work. I can see by the numbers how many people saw themselves in my poems and as a writer I feel like that was part of the goal. All being fair I should have just carried on posting that kind of content (and maybe I’ll pick it back up) but something didn’t and still doesn’t sit right with me. 

I felt like I was just a content conveyor belt and maybe in this new era of the internet that’s what’s needed to succeed and all I’m doing right now is shooting myself in the foot. But I remember the days of blogging before SEO and Pinterest and the Buzzfeed clickbait article style really took hold. I remember feeling like I knew my blog’s followers and they knew me. I may have only posted once a week or once every two weeks but the posts were meaningful and sparked conversation and a true connection with the people who read my work and gosh dang it I miss that. I miss it so much. 

Following social media trends snuffed out the creativity in my content. As a writer your creativity is a core part of who you are so I began to resent creating because I felt like I’d lost a part of me. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to write new poems because I didn’t feel that they’d do well on social media and with the algorithm. I did a degree in creative & professional writing, if anything was going to destroy my love for writing it should have been tha with but in reality it was creating for social media and the internet that did it. 

Let’s take this full circle and go back to my TikTok feed being a mess. I’m aware that social media follows an algorithm, and algorithm that will show you more of what you engage in. In many ways my feed is a product of me and I have the power to change that, just like I have the power to change my approach to building my author platform. 

I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of creating short form content but I can acknowledge that if I want my book to be ‘successful’ it is the way to go. However, I can also acknowledge that I love writing long form content, I will always be a blogger at heart and ignoring that part of myself as a creative isn’t working. I can also acknowledge that I never wrote my book to make money and as far as my priorities go, I’d be happier with less engagement but a genuine author platform where I could content with my readers. Perhaps this is what this post is, me explaining to myself why I’m starting blogging again even though I know it won’t ever have the reach or the engagement as TikTok. 

Maybe this is the start of something new.