I love writing books. I love figuring out the plot and developing the characters and world-building. I love the thrill of uncovering new twists that I hadn’t planned on having. I even love editing and polishing the manuscript until it’s the best I can possibly make it.
But there is one part of being an author that I hate—the social media.
I’ve always sort of had a love-hate thing with social media. I love keeping up with friends and winning the admiration of strangers. Who doesn’t? But I hate the lack of privacy, the everchanging algorithms, and the nagging feeling that everybody else’s content looks better than mine.
I’m naturally a fairly private person, so I was pretty late to the social media game. I went years without a Facebook account and I’d ditch them again gladly, if I didn’t need to use Messenger to communicate on occasion and I didn’t need to monitor the neighborhood Facebook group to see what everyone is annoyed about this week. It’s always something.
I joined Instagram to keep up with friends and when used for that purpose, it’s not too bad. So it was somewhat natural for me, when I decided to start attempting to market my books, to have an Instagram account, since that was the social media I was most familiar with.
This was probably foolish, because I think Instagram is dying. Gen Z doesn’t like it. They like TikTok. I would like to join TikTok, except that I hate watching and making videos, which is kinda a problem with TikTok.
But it may be the best path, nonetheless. I wanted to schedule my Instagram posts once a week so that I could set it up and forget about it. But apparently, this cannot be done without a Facebook page and every time I go to make a Kate Lexie Facebook page, they deactivate it, claiming it does not meet their community guidelines. No explanation of what in particular they object to and no way to talk to anyone about it.
I’ve spent nearly a month trying to sort it out, but I think I’m done. If Facebook and Instagram don’t want me…well, TikTok does. It really makes more sense anyway, since I write books for teenagers and that’s where teenagers hang out.
I just have to figure out how to do some TikTok dances and I’m good to go. They don’t look difficult. I don’t like to brag, but I have taken several years of dance classes…
I just wish I could write books and not worry about the marketing/social media aspect. I just want to write.
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