Social Media

From Chuck Wendig:

So, how are the various social media platforms doing? Are they worth your time as a person, as a writer, as seven possums in a trenchcoat? Given that community and audience are both found and earned through these social networks, I figure it’s worth taking a gander at them again as I’ve done a number of times over the last year — in part because the social media landscape has broken into a number of little islands thanks to various tectonic shifts beneath the internet crust and we’re all just trying to find a place to rest our digital heads at night. Also in part because, as a writer, I need to find not just a place to HAWK MY WORDY WARES, which is of dubious value, but rather a place where I can meet writers and readers and agents and publishing folks and bookstore people and in general contribute to a larger, greater, cooler bookish ecosystem.

That said, as always, this is all purely my perspective. It is zero percent useful wisdom and one hundred percent just some bullshit that passed through my head like a cloud of stupid. I am not to be listened to. I’m just some jackass with a blog. Proceed with that situational awareness.

Threads.

So, to jump to the start, I’m on Threads now.

It’s fine!

That’s more or less my capsule review. It’s fine! It’s fine. It’s fine.

Some general thoughts about it:

a) It’s obviously tied to Instagram and Facebook and therefore is tied to Zuckerberg which is bad and not good. No, it’s not awesome having to pick your social media platform based on which billionaire sociopath upsets you the least? But it is what it is, I guess. Our choices in life do not always amount to great ones, woefully.

b) If you want the place where the celebrities, the brands, the media outlets, are all going, it’s probably there. It’s got a big crowd — a lot of transfers over from Instagram, I guess? Despite the big crowd I don’t think it feels that peppy as yet. I can’t actually tell how many people I’m following (?) but it seems like a good group. That said, I do see a lot more general activity happening on Bluesky. Still, Threads is not precisely quiet, either, and even in the week since I’ve joined it looks to have picked up a bit.

c) There is a “who you follow” feed, which appears to present the posts of your followed accounts in the order they are posted. But it defaults to an algorithmic FYP feed, which shows a random disgorgement of… I mean, I assume it’s whatever the Insane Robot That Governs The Place wants you to see. It definitely seems to prioritize verified accounts over non-verified.

d) There does seem to be a pretty good bookish crowd of writers and readers.

e) The vibe there is… I dunno, is it wrong if I say, Ruby Tuesdays? Applebees? Like, if Twitter is currently your local Nazi Bar, and Bluesky is your local Eclectic Diner, this definitely feels like a popular-but-functional chain restaurant. People are having a nice enough time and it feels pretty reliable. It’s the “Hey, let’s go to Chili’s” variant of social media. Sometimes, you want that, and that’s okay, no shame.

f) The one thing I like about it in theory but not in practice is the granularity of how you can see your engagement — there’s All, Follows, Replies, Mentions, Quotes, Reposts, Verified, Dunks, Trolls, Posts By People Who Don’t Know What They’re Talking About But Probably Mean Well, Devil’s Advocates, Robots, Dog Photos, Replies From Stalkers, and People Who Still Think NFTs Are Cool. Or something like that. Point is, it’s definitely more granular but… I also don’t feel like each tab works great, and I’m really not seeing a lot of actually existing replies, and the overall GUI of those pages feels noisy and hard for me to parse, for some reason. That might just be me, though.

So, it’s fine! I don’t hate it. I don’t yet love it. It exists and I’m using it and have found some value there and in part that value is finding friends who are using it, too. Which is nice. I wasn’t going to join it but… real talk, writing is a lonely gig and sometimes you want to feel like there’s a room you can go into and hear some voices. Further, publishing is in a place where it’s still not sure exactly how to navigate the shattered social media landscape, and as much as I hate to say it, that means it’s (yet again) on writers to actually carve out their spaces and — well, we’re all just trying to either not die in the abyss or, at the very least, find other people dying in the abyss with us so we can commiserate with one another as we sink softly into the pudding of oblivion.

(Also, The Pudding of Oblivion is my next next novel, out in 2026.)

At the very least, Threads is not Twitter.

. . . .

TikTok.

I continue to not be on there or literally see anything that happens there and I’m probably better for it, and you’re probably better not seeing me there, and I think that’s a good decision we’re all making. I do understand that BookTok is currently *checks notes* kind of in control of publishing, whether it realizes it or not, and as such, I guess I should probably be there and be paying attention? At the same time, I can’t control it, and I suspect it would just cause my brain to swell up like an overfed tick and then it would pop and there’d be anxious brain goo everywhere. So, again, I remain here. Without the Tiks or the Toks to keep me warm at night.

. . . .

Facebook.

If you need to know what your racist aunt or that guy from high school is up to, Facebook is your jam. I dunno. It seems to throttle links now and ennh. I use it as a walled garden to keep up with family and friends, that’s it.

Link to the rest at Chuck Wendig

From The Book Designer:

Before we get to the 10 best WordPress themes for authors, let’s get one thing out of the way.

Yes, you need an author website!

Too much enthusiasm? I think not. 

Over the years  I’ve seen way too many authors miss out on opportunities to engage with their audience and even sell more books because they don’t believe that they need a website, or they feel that being on social media is enough. Or, they don’t want to be on the internet at all. I kind of understand the reasoning behind the last one, but you still need a house, even if you’re never at home. 

. . . .

Now let’s talk about the best WordPress themes for authors and finding the best one for your author website.

When it comes to author websites, any ol’ template won’t work. As writers and authors, we have specific needs that not every template provides. For this list, I selected themes that met the following criteria:

• Multiple layout options: You don’t want your website to look like your author neighbor across the internet street. 
• Shop/Store option: Having an easy way to sell your books directly to your readers built into the theme (even if you don’t need it at first) will make life easier. 
• Theme Support: It’s tough when you have questions but can’t find anyone to answer them.
• Blog style options: An author has to write, so please give her some options.
• At least a 4 out of 5-star rating (at the time of this article.)
• Regularly updated
• Detailed documentation

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

After the excerpt above, the OP goes through each of his Ten Best WordPress Templates.

PG has his opinions, but, since he’s not an author, share your opinions and selections in the comments.

From Publishers Weekly:

Whenever someone chooses to leave social media, you hear the same refrain: it’s gotten so negative, I can’t stand it. To me, that’s a reason to stay.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather hang out with people who like me in real life, and I’d certainly rather hear praise than criticism. But when it comes to building an audience online, it’s better to be hated than loved. For better or worse, social media rewards engagement, and negativity fuels engagement.

You may have heard the old saying, “All publicity is good publicity.” But I’m here to tell you that the best publicity of all is absolute hatred. Your online haters can inadvertently give you effective marketing, spread your name to new groups, give you opportunities to respond persuasively, and sharpen your brand.

Once you recognize this, haters also lose some of their power. They may try to bring you down by making you feel small or unworthy. If they make you feel bad, provoke you into an ill-tempered response, or drive you offline, they win. But once you realize they’re inadvertently boosting you, it’s an opportunity to turn that dynamic around.

I’ll give you an example: the online trick shot group Dude Perfect. These five guys have filmed themselves doing everything from calling and making a hole in one to sinking a basketball from a skyscraper. They’re good, and their online comments reflect viewers’ utter disbelief. And not just stunned amazement or polite questions about the veracity of videos—they deal with everything from scorn to conspiracy theories. This is a level of mastery everyone should aspire to and something I write about in my book So Good They Call You a Fake.

In an interview on Good Morning America, Dude Perfect member Cody Jones said the group loves it when people call their shots fake because it makes what they do “seem even more ridiculously impossible,” leading to more publicity and clicks on YouTube. Online haters are literally putting money in their pockets.

Now, not all online hate is created equal. When people are responding to you with racial hate and bigotry, their comments obviously provide no value. It’s best to report and block these people rather than engage with them.

The haters I’m talking about are people who come at you because of what you do. They’re the ones who criticize you because you’re talented or smart or successful—and they simply can’t stand it. For that reason, they try to cast doubt on your achievements and minimize your talents. These haters and trolls, who tend to move in packs, will latch onto something you say and begin circulating it among themselves, adding their own put-downs. But their attacks merely serve to elevate your standing online.

I’ll give an example from my social media feed. Last year, I was musing on the flaws of some popular movies, which could help authors more effectively write books. I went onto what was then still called Twitter, and shared a thread of my observations about how Captain Marvel, Rey from Star Wars, and Bo Peep from Toy Story were examples of what fans call a Mary Sue—a character with no flaws or weaknesses. I argued that this robs them of narrative arcs and obstacles to overcome, and ultimately is a disservice to viewers who want to see a strong female character.

My core audience—people who want to improve their writing or just enjoy well-told stories—loved my posts, but soon a new audience of haters found them and were determined to argue with me because I had criticized popular female characters. These haters seemed to be responding more to one another than to anything I’d written, high-fiving one another with each withering reply.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Since PG had never heard of Dude Perfect, he did a little investigation for the benefit of visitors to TPV.

From The Rand Blog:

Like many, I’ve recently been using social media to follow the war in the Middle East. As a habit, following news like this makes a certain amount of sense—social media has often been one of the better sources for breaking information on emerging crises.

Many aspects of this war are unique, but what is increasingly common is that my social media feeds, along with those of many others, are populated with extremely graphic images, many of which, having seen them, I fervently wished I could unsee. Yet I still felt compelled to follow the news, to seek out ever-more visceral videos and details of this unfolding human tragedy.

I am far from alone in my exposure to this extreme content. And while it may seem like being an active, informed citizen requires such immersion in raw imagery, I am also a social psychologist and should know better.

Immersive Sensory Experiences Tied to Secondary Trauma

The effects of a traumatic event—and the events in Israel and Gaza are certainly that—are, as we psychologists well know, contagious. That is, their effects can spread well beyond their initial victims. In war, those victims include those who are displaced, injured, and killed, as well as those who have lost a loved one.

The idea of secondary trauma recognizes that people indirectly exposed to an event like war can suffer as well.

Take, for example, drone operators, who endlessly scan live footage and take split-second orders to fire rockets at suspected terrorists, then commute home in time for dinner. Even though they are not physically exposed to harm, these immersive sensory experiences become associated with real trauma.

That jarring disconnect, especially because it often goes unacknowledged, becomes its own form of trauma for people in critical roles such as emergency rescuers, social media content moderators, law enforcement, and intelligence analysts.

Secondary trauma was, for a long time, largely confined to people involved in the initial event, like first responders. Thanks to technology, however, it can now afflict anyone with a smartphone.

And now, as graphic images from Israel and Gaza proliferate on social media, it is likely that these images are having significant negative impacts on the mental health and well-being of many—especially adolescents and young adults, who already struggle mightily

And Social Media Choices Help Spread Secondary Trauma

The proliferation of traumatizing social media content is, make no mistake, a deliberate choice. People post war dispatches for many reasons, such as to expose atrocities, but also to deceive and to serve as propaganda. Hamas attackers have hijacked victims’ social media accounts to sow even more terror.

For their part, social media platforms have actively encouraged the spread of misinformation—this after layoffs shed their ability to weed it out.

Social media algorithms also drive people to extreme content, even when they’re not actively looking for it.

The global mental health impacts of this war are only just beginning. But, like its casualties, they will likely be staggering. Social media companies could and should do more to moderate the virality of such content, but they have largely abdicated this responsibility.

Many have withdrawn from the business of providing news—that is, accurate and relevant information—leaving behind a toxic stew of false and misleading posts. Communities might need to seek out less-toxic alternatives to the digital town square.

That mental health and health behaviors are contagious is both good and bad news. Parents should look to improve their own social media habits and model a healthy digital lifestyle for their kids. Digital health companies could also shift their focus from individual to public health.

Young people are in many ways their own best hope. Today’s youth are active and enthusiastic about shaping the world they will grow up in. Policymakers would do well to prioritize younger voices, concerns, and ideas when thinking through proposals toward building a less-traumatizing form of social media.

Trauma is often described as a shattering of one’s assumptions or worldviews. That is, when events collide with our expectations, beliefs, or hopes, we are forced to reconsider what is truly possible.

This latest war—set in a world still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, grappling with social isolation and mental health crises—has provided plenty of traumatizing developments, with the grim promise of more to come. Mitigating their impact on global mental health might require some combination of regulations, “healthy” social networks, or personal behavior change.

Link to the rest at The Rand Blog

From Jane Friedman:

This summer, Wattpad is running their 14th annual Watty Awards, the company’s annual global writing competition. It’s open to writers in nine languages across 11 genres. In addition to cash prizes, one winner will receive a book deal from the Wattpad WEBTOON Book Group, and nine winners will receive adaptation opportunities with Wattpad WEBTOON Studios. (Judging closes on August 8, 2023.)

I asked three past winners about their experience of seeing their work adapted for the major streaming services. They are:

• Ariana Godoy, best known for Through My Window, which has more than 350 million reads on Wattpad and has been adapted into a hit film from Netflix and Wattpad WEBTOON Studios. The film is one of the top five most viewed non-English films of all time on the platform. Ariana is a Latina immigrant from Venezuela who was an elementary school teacher before leaving her job to write full time.
• From Malaysia, Claudia Tan is a new adult romance writer, graduating from Lancaster University with a BA in English Literature and History. Her Perfect series on Wattpad has accumulated over 163 million reads, and nabbed the People’s Choice Award in the Wattys Awards in 2015 and 2016. The series has also been published in French by Hachette Romans and Perfect Addiction (86 million reads on Wattpad) was adapted into a feature film from Wattpad WEBTOON Studios and Constantin Film. The movie was released internationally on Amazon Prime in March 2023 and debuted in the top 10 most-watched movies all over the world, according to Flixpatrol.
• Beth Reekles is the author of The Kissing Booth, which she first published on Wattpad in 2010, when she was 15 years old. The story won a Watty Award in 2011 and went on to accumulate almost 20 million reads before being published. Reekles signed a three-book deal with Penguin Random House and was named one of Time Magazine’s Most Influential Teenagers in 2013. Produced by Netflix and Komixx Entertainment, The Kissing Booth went on to become one of the most watched films in the world when it was released on Netflix, according to the streamer.

. . . .

Jane: What was your initial motivation for writing and publishing on Wattpad?

Ariana Godoy (AG): I’ve loved reading since I was a kid. Growing up, I didn’t have money to buy books so I would read the few stories that I had over and over. When I found Wattpad and realized it was free, I was thrilled because it had thousands of stories for me to enjoy, and I was even more excited when I realized anyone could post their work. Seeing other authors achieve success motivated me to post my first story in 2009.

Claudia Tan (CT): I mostly wanted to use it as a training ground to hone my writing skills. I was also keen to find a home for the types of stories I wanted to write, but before Wattpad, had no audience.

Beth Reekles (BR): I thought—why not! I was already on the platform as a reader and enjoyed writing, so figured I had nothing to lose. The ability to be anonymous also really appealed to me.

How much were you involved in the adaptation of your work to the screen?

AG: I was quite involved. It was a bittersweet process because as an author, that first time you see the script, it kind of shocks you and it takes time for you to adapt and understand that movies are just a different format, a different way to tell your story. Working with the team and the amazing cast has been incredible, they really pour their heart out to represent the story and I think they did a great job.

CT: I was asked to review the early versions of the script, but changes were up to the studio and the director to implement.

BR: I got to meet with the scriptwriter/director, Vince Marcello, early in the process and give feedback on the script. It was clear that he really understood the characters and the story and I knew I could trust him with The Kissing Booth.

Was there anything that surprised you about the effects of having your work available on a major streaming service?

AG: Oh, definitely. I didn’t expect the movie to get to the top 10 in so many countries and it was amazing to see how many messages I received from fans. I was shocked that my little Spanish story was discovered and enjoyed by people from all over the world!

CT: To be able to capture a wider audience for my writing has been really rewarding. As an author from Malaysia this was a major achievement, and an opportunity that not many people from here have.

BR: Only that I wasn’t able to get a DVD/physical copy (I’m a big fan of keeping DVDs of my favorite movies)! That said, seeing my work on Netflix felt like a natural progression as I started my writing career online.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG had not thought about Wattpad for some time. He’s glad to hear that authors are finding readers there and being scouted by others who take their writing seriously.

From Write to Done:

Identifying blogging ideas for beginners is one of the most open-ended, arguably enjoyable, tasks you will have as a new writer. Blogging ideas span all topics, nichés, and fields, so wherever you are in your journey, you can find your own best starting point.

If you dream of starting a blog but aren’t sure where to start, in this article I list more than twenty-five blogging ideas for beginners, tips for starting, and platform recommendations.

#1 – Book Reviews

If you write, you likely read, and creating a blog on each book you finish is a great way to create consistent content.

#2 – Movie Reviews

The same can be said for movies or TV shows. Only forty-five minutes or a few hours in length, writing posts on your reviews of movies is a helpful way to launch your blog.

#3 – How-To Guides

We can’t exclude how-to guides with our list of blogging ideas for beginners! Whether you want to teach your audience how to cook or how to write a poem, guides are a simple place to start. 

#4 – Analyzing Characters

When it comes to blogging ideas for beginners, if you’re feeling brave, you can push yourself with a deep dive into the analysis of your favorite protagonists.

#5 – Writing Tips

If you have quite a bit of writing experience, writing on one writing tip per blog will be valuable for other writers.

#6 – Publishing Information

Additionally, once you choose a specific publishing route, sharing what you know about the details of your publishing method will help future authors. 

. . . .

#8 – Pros And Cons

What do you love about writing? What are the downsides? A realistic view of the writing life could be one of your best blogging ideas for beginners.  

#9 – Poetry

Sometimes it’s fun to use blogs for a different genre of writing than you may typically share. Poetry is a safe option if you’re not quite ready to share your prose.

. . . .

#13 – Insights On Writing

Blog ideas for beginners can be as simple as sharing the last insight you had as you edited your work-in-progress.

#14 – Lessons From Your Life

Do you lead a unique life? Use your blog as an online journal.

#15 – Fiction Based On Real Life

We often see unique situations in real life. The mattress on the side of the road. The abandoned building. Use these situations for short story inspiration. 

#16 – Character Backstories

If you dream of becoming a full-time novelist, consider sharing the backstories of your characters.

#17 – Character Short Stories

Similarly, consider writing short stories for various peripheral characters who don’t have much page time in your novel. 

Link to the rest at Write to Done

From Jane Friedman:

If you’re an author who’s been using Mailchimp to grow your list and improve sales, it might be time to ditch Mailchimp and move to Substack.

This is a big decision. I understand.

After all, as a small publisher, I recently made the decision to move our Every Day Poems publication to Substack, and it took some real work to successfully do so.

Why did I risk relocating a publication that was approaching its twelfth birthday?

Two big reasons I started the ball rolling

1. Mailchimp has seriously raised its prices since it was taken over by Intuit and since it has pivoted to be a heavier e-commerce service. Regarding pricing, I asked Mailchimp for a solution that might be appropriate for their customers who are part of the creator economy, and they said, “You could delete subscribers.” That just didn’t seem like a sustainable solution if the goal is growth.
2. One of our T. S. Poetry Press author/illustrators started a few Substacks last fall and immediately built her lists into the thousands (from nothing!); we watched her book sales start climbing. That sales trend has continued for her and for another author of ours who also moved to Substack.

The bottom line?

We saw a chance to cut costs and increase sales. What’s not to love.

Beyond that, we want to suggest 5 more reasons you might want to ditch Mailchimp and move to Substack.

5 reasons to make the move

1. You can get paid, instead of paying. Substack is technically a subscription service, and while you can offer your newsletter for free, you can also offer it at a minimum of $5 a month or $30 a year. Some people charge more. Sure, you can charge for your Mailchimp newsletter, too, but you have to pay to play. If your lists are in the thousands at Mailchimp, this can become quite pricey.

We went for the 5 & 30 model at two of the Substacks we now run. And while we lost paying subscribers when we made our initial move, the revenue has since tripled. That’s partly because we also added a new offering: The Write to Poetry. It might also be due to Reason # 2 below.

2. You’ll be in an ecosystem instead of a silo. Substack sends your newsletter to inboxes, just like Mailchimp, but it also publishes your content to the Web. This is extremely important for creating an ecosystem instead of a silo. All your free posts are easily likeable and shareable and, if you allow comments, can provide for engagement.

On top of that, the Substack network allows publications to recommend other publications—sort of the way blogs used to have sidebars where they recommended other blogs. If you really hit it big, you might even get recommended by Substack (that happened for us with Every Day Poems, and we picked up a lot of subscribers when it did!)

3. You can have searchable archives instead of invisibility. Substack has excellent SEO, and your archives (even your paid ones, if you toggle to discoverability) are discoverable by search engines. With Mailchimp, there are no archives except in people’s inboxes. Not optimal.

Does it make a difference? Our Substack stats show that it does. We’ve gotten new free and paid subscribers via Google searches that landed people right on our regular content—content that with Mailchimp would not have been findable by search engines.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG would be interested in the thoughts of others on the Mailchimp v. Substack discussion. He does admit being a bit disappointed in Mailchimp’s performance in the last couple of Mrs. PG’s book releases.

From The Grammarly Blog:

Perhaps you’ve heard of a meme but don’t quite “get it.” Chances are, though, you’ve seen a meme and related to it—even if you didn’t know what it was called. Memes are a cultural phenomenon often used as a form of social commentary.

What makes a meme successful isn’t its length but rather its ability to resonate with a particular audience and capture a cultural moment or trend. Here, we’ll define and explain what a meme is and offer a few tips in case you want to try your hand at writing your own meme.

What is a meme?

Now, you might be wondering how to pronounce the word meme. The correct pronunciation is meem (rhymes with dream). The modern-day definition of a meme is a humorous image, video, piece of text, or GIF that is spread across the internet, typically on social media, and often with slight variations. Memes can be created by anyone and can be about anything, from current events, to mundane tasks, to pop culture references.

The length of a meme varies. Because they can take the form of images, symbols, text, videos, or GIFs, they can be as short as a single image or phrase and as long as a multi-minute video with an elaborate narrative. Some memes have short-lived bursts of popularity on social media, while others endure for years.

Memes appear almost everywhere you find digital files being shared, including:

• Social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok
• Online communities like Reddit and Tumblr
• Messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram
• Image-sharing sites like Imgur and Flickr
• Online forums and discussion boards

Where do memes come from?

The concept of memes traces its roots to biologist Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined a meme as a cultural unit that spreads from person to person, much as genes spread through reproduction. The term meme itself comes from the Greek word mimema, which means “that which is imitated.”

Dawkins’s book shows that examples of memes go back centuries. But these days, when we think of memes, internet memes are usually what come to mind. The first internet meme is widely considered to be the “Dancing Baby,” a 3D animated baby doing a cha-cha dance that became popular in the late 1990s.

What’s the purpose of a meme?

Memes serve a variety of purposes, including the following.

• Providing humor, analogy, or entertainment
• Expressing emotions and feelings
• Conveying cultural references and social commentary
• Fostering a sense of community and belonging through shared experiences

Link to the rest at The Grammarly Blog

For those who don’t remember:

From The Verge:

Full-time Twitter CEO and part-time Tesla enthusiast Elon Musk said on Saturday that users of his social media platform will be able to avoid media subscriptions and pay per article starting “next month.” Musk says that Twitter’s forthcoming “one-click” service “should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public” by allowing media companies to charge a higher per article price to readers who wouldn’t necessarily pay a full subscription rate.

Musk didn’t say what percentage Twitter would pocket for itself or what conditions media publishers would need to abide by.

As with all Musk timelines, it’s best to take the “next month” estimate as an absolute best case scenario for the arrival of Twitter’s pay-as-you go micro-transaction service. But I don’t doubt Musk’s urgency. Twitter is in a race to grow revenue even as it alienates long-time users and antagonizes media organizations — both of whom are actively testing waters elsewhere. The latest Twitter alternative du jour is Bluesky, which recently added Twitter royalty Darth, Dril, and AOC to its ranks. 

Twitter’s pay-per-article announcement comes at a time when Musk is attempting to lure creators to the beleaguered platform. In addition to courting individual podcast creators directly, Musk is also urging creators worldwide to begin monetizing their content with Twitter Subscriptions (previously known as Super Follows) with a promise that “Twitter will keep none of the money” for the first 12 months. 

Link to the rest at The Verge

From Vox:

Walk into a Barnes & Noble these days, and you’ll see a peculiar sight. Instead of Barnes & Noble branding everywhere, there’s BookTok branding everywhere.

Tables of books emblazoned with BookTok signs, pushing the books that are popularly recommended on TikTok’s reading community. A little reading journal for sale titled BookTok Made Me Read It. A special display just for Colleen Hoover, who went from indie romance author to queen of the bestseller list after blowing up on BookTok. There’s a little sign over her name that says “BookTok.”

Loosely speaking, BookTok is a community of people on TikTok who focus all their content on books. They pan their cameras across shelves of beautiful hardcovers, analyze the tropes of their favorite genres, recommend their favorite books, record themselves throwing their favorite books across the room in a fury of emotional overwhelm. The stereotype is that BookTokers lean young and emotional, but as users are quick to point out, the community is huge. Search the #BookTok tag long enough, and you’re bound to find a BookToker who talks about books that appeal to you.

What all BookTokers have in common is that they are a hot commodity. Barnes & Noble is leaning so hard into the BookTok angle right now because, simply put, BookTok sells books. It’s one of the only things that does.

“It’s one of the strongest drivers that we’ve seen in the US market in the last couple of years. It is the only area of the market right now with very strong growth,” says Kristen McLean, the primary industry analyst for books at the industry tracker Circana BookScan. “When I look at the data, there’s no other area of the US publishing market that we can pin that’s seeing that level of year-over-year growth right now. That’s the third year of growth for these authors.”

During lockdown, as Americans with extra time on their hands began picking up books to keep themselves busy, the US book market grew at unprecedented rates. The post-vaccine market appears to have corrected itself. Before the pandemic, it was common for the US book market to grow at rates of 3 or 4 percent. From 2019 to 2021, it grew 21 percent. In the first three months of 2023, according to Circana, it has declined 1 percent — except for the authors whose books blew up on BookTok. So far this year, they’re seeing an increase of 43 percent over their 2022 sales figures.

In a market where it’s notoriously difficult for anyone to make a living, BookTok is helping a select few people make a whole lot of money. That state of affairs raises a surprisingly knotty question: How much of that cash is making its way back to the creators who made the videos that are generating all of these book sales in the first place? And how is it getting to them?

Link to the rest at Vox

Here’s an example of a BookTok feed (PG hopes it only plays audio when you’re on this post of TPV.)

You may have to click on the speaker icon to hear the soundtrack.

From The Bookseller:

One in four book buyers used TikTok/BookTok in 2022 and these consumers accounted for nearly 90 million book purchases last year, according to findings from Nielsen’s latest Books & Consumers survey.

Each month, the market measurement firm surveys 8,500 UK consumers aged between 13 and 84. Details from these surveys have been extrapolated to estimate the UK’s consumer book purchasing market in the year to March 2023.

In a presentation delivered at the London Transport Museum today (Wednesday, 22nd March), Nielsen revealed that UK consumers bought a total of 348 million books in 2022. This represents a 2% decrease over five years: in 2018, total UK book sales stood at 355 million. In terms of spending, 2022 sales clocked in at £2.5bn, £250m of which were printed book sales. This represents a 4% increase on 2018, when total spending came in at £240m.

Overall, TikTok’s influence remains relatively small. In 2022, just 3% of all books purchased, roughly nine million, were originally discovered via video assistance platforms (which Nielsen counts as YouTube and TikTok).

And while it is difficult to put a specific figure on the platform’s overall influence on the books market, Nielsen reports that sales of titles which feature the word “TikTok” in their subtitles (for example, “TikTok made me buy it” or “The TikTok sensation of the year”) totalled approximately £46m in 2022. This figure is based on top 100,000 bestseller list data and includes work by the likes of Colleen Hoover (£15.9m), Alice Oseman (£9.9m), Taylor Jenkins Reid (£2.5m), Karen McManus (£2.0m), Ali Hazelwood (£1.4m), Ana Huang (£1.3m) and Elena Armas (£1.2m).

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

From The Economist:

Is tiktok’s time up? As the social-media app’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, prepares for a grilling before Congress on March 23rd, TikTok’s 100m-plus users in America fret that their government is preparing to ban the Chinese-owned platform on security fears. Their anguish contrasts with utter glee in Silicon Valley, where home-grown social-media firms would love to be rid of their popular rival. With every grumble from Capitol Hill, the share prices of Meta, Snap, Pinterest and others edge higher.

TikTok’s fate hangs in the balance. But what is already clear is that the app has changed social media for good—and in a way that will make life much harder for incumbent social apps. In less than six years TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it addicted to algorithmically selected short-form video. Users love it. The trouble for social apps is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so.

The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).

TikTok’s success has prompted its rivals to reinvent themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has turned both apps’ main feeds into algorithmically sorted “discovery engines” and launched Reels, a TikTok clone bolted onto Facebook and Instagram. Similar lookalike products have been created by YouTube (Shorts), Snapchat (Spotlight), Pinterest (Watch) and even Netflix (Fast Laughs). The latest TikTok-inspired makeover, announced on March 8th, was by Spotify, a music app whose homepage now features video clips that can be skipped by swiping up. (TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, is having a similar effect in its home market, where digital giants like Tencent are increasingly putting short videos at the centre of their offerings.)

The result is that short-form video has taken over social media. Of the 64 minutes that the average American spends viewing social media each day, 40 minutes are spent watching video clips, up from 28 minutes just three years ago, estimates Bernstein, a broker. However, this transformation comes with a snag. Although users have a seemingly endless appetite for short video, the format is proving less profitable than the old news feed.

TikTok monetises its American audience at a rate of just $0.31 per hour, a third the rate of Facebook and a fifth the rate of Instagram (see chart 3). This year it will make about $67 from each of its American users, while Instagram will make more than $200, estimates Insider Intelligence, a research firm. Nor is this just a TikTok problem. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors last month that “Currently, the monetisation efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed, so the more that Reels grows…it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money.”

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

These days, pretty much all writers need to learn to write Web content. Yes, even if you’re a Victorian romance author whose readers care more about reticules and spatterdashers than retweets and SEO. Even if you don’t have your own blog. Any website needs content.

. . . .

Like it or not, all writers need to become “Web content providers” these days.

Yeah, I know. Sounds a lot less creative than “author” doesn’t it? And harder.

But it actually isn’t. Writing Web content is a little different from writing a traditional essay or magazine article, but it’s not hard. You just have to learn some basic guidelines.

Learning to Write Web Content Involves Unlearning

Especially what you were taught about paragraphing.

According to Mike Blankenship at Smart Blogger, the paragraph has gone through radical changes in the 21st century.  He says the 100-200 word standard paragraph has disappeared.  Now your average paragraph should be between two and four lines. You can go over and under — some paragraphs can be just one word long — but stay close to that average and you should be fine.

But don’t make them all the same length. Blankenship says, “Too many same-sized paragraphs in a row will bore your reader. It doesn’t matter if it’s too many small paragraphs or too many long paragraphs, the effect is similar.”

I had to unlearn a whole lot of what I was taught about writing prose back in the 20th century in order to be an effective Web content provider today.

. . . .

Back in the 20th century, good writers…

• Learned to use topic sentences and avoid cutting to a new paragraph until there’s a new topic.
• Wrote for people who paid money for a number of words and read every one.
• Wouldn’t put a title on a serious essay that looked like a cheap tabloid headline.
• Avoided repetition.
• Would never offer an outline instead of an essay.
• Substantiated information with footnotes.
• Never heard of tags, keywords, or SEO.

But the majority of people don’t read on the Internet; they skim. In fact, most people don’t even skim the whole article. Farhad Manjoo famously reported that only half the people who visit a website read past the first hundred words.

So how do you get them to come by…and stick around?

Forget all of the above and learn some new tricks:

1) Write Intriguing Titles

This is probably the most important aspect of learning to write Web content.

Mystery author C. Hope Clark once said in her “Funds for Writers” newsletter: “You might be surprised at the key factor I use in deleting or holding to read: The quality of the subject line. Hey, when time is crazy limited…the words have to snag me as I rush by. That means first and foremost that the subject be crisp, sharp, attractive, intriguing, or whatever adjective you want to use that gives me whiplash. It has to shout, “HEY, READ ME OR YOU’LL REGRET IT.”

She’s right.

Headers are the most important element of a blog’s content, and it’s the one most novelists don’t get. We want our blogs and newsletters to sound creative and literary like our books, not cheesy like a supermarket tabloid. But tabloid journalists are good at what they do. They have only a moment to grab a reader going through that checkout line, so they need an irresistible hook.

In our case, headers need to snag a reader in the endless stream of content Web browsers can choose from.

So how do we do that?

Here are 8 ways you can grab a Web reader’s attention with your story about, say, a writer who suspects her bathroom is haunted.

1. Stir emotions: “The Tragic Ghost that Haunts my Bathroom.”
2. Offer useful advice: “How to Make Sure a Building isn’t Haunted before you Sign that Rental Agreement.”
3. You can sensationalize: “Why This Woman is Afraid of her own Bathroom!”
4. Or appeal to sentiment: “This Story of a Cat and a Flapper’s Ghost Will Melt Your Heart.”
5. Maybe stir up some greed: “How Wendy Writer inked a 7- Figure Deal with her Haunted Bathroom Story.”
6. Paranoia is good: “Is Your Bathroom Haunted?”  Or “Who or WHAT is Flushing Your Toilet in the Middle of the Night?”
7. Curiosity, too: “10 Things You Don’t Know about Poltergeists.”
8. Or you can appeal to thriftiness: “Save Money and Time with a Do-It-Yourself Exorcism.”

. . . .

2) Promise a Fast Read

Everybody’s in a hurry online.

Author Jillian Mullin  wrote in the Web Writer Spotlight: “Generally, an average Web user only spends 10 to 30 seconds reading Internet content. People rarely read web pages word-per-word. Instead, they scan the page for related keywords, bullet points, subtitles, and quotes.”

That’s why one of the best ways to let people know you’ve got a quick, easy-scan piece is with a numbered “listicle” like “The Top 10 Best Ghostwritten Books” or “5 Signs Your Computer is Possessed.”

The other thing is to learn to harness the power of white space. A page with lots of white space can be taken in at a glance.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris

From GQ:

I did my best to stay away from BookTok for as long as I could but, in my defence, I was stranded in the rural Irish tundra for Christmas and I’d already worked through the latest series of Emily in Paris. Of course, I’d heard all about how it has allegedly changed the books industry forever and made some authors millionaires practically overnight. But I didn’t need another addiction in my life, I already have Coca-Cola and Byredo candles. Yet, there I was, scrolling and scrolling. BookTok had got me.

It became my latest obsession in much the same way that one might become obsessed with sticking your tongue in plug sockets. But there was just something about watching the same twenty books being flaunted again and again; people openly confessing to owning hundreds of unread books; the flagrant abuse of sticky tabs in novels that absolutely do not require that much citation; bookshelves that are so perfect that arouse suspicion; people calling themselves “certified bookworms” but, like, entirely earnestly; frequent references to people’s “yearly reading goals”; something called New Adult? It was like entering a parallel universe where reading wasn’t just something that someone did for fun, it was a lifestyle, an aesthetic, people were “readers” like Lorraine Kelly is “Lorraine Kelly”. But one thing just wouldn’t leave my head as I scrolled endlessly through this cursed landscape: I think I’m responsible for this.

Way back in the 2010s there used to be a community of book lovers on YouTube. The collective, known as BookTube, was very much a precursor to today’s BookTok. Some of the pillars of BookTok (books hauls, unhauls, challenges, reading wrap-ups) were pioneered on BookTube and, for a while at least, it was a cosy and wholesome corner of the internet. I used to be a BookTuber, one of the bigger ones actually, it’s kind of the reason why I was able to have some legitimacy when I transitioned into writing about books as a career.

I stopped making BookTube videos because the community had become overrun by commercialism. Near the end of the 2010s, many of the major BookTubers had essentially become pawns in the hands of publishing houses. They’d receive boxes upon boxes of books that they’d then “haul” (basically, just show off) and then you’d never see those books mentioned again. The act of reading became replaced by the act of being a reader. Actual reviews became few and far between and many of the smaller, genuine readers on the platform jumped ship. It feels like BookTok has got to the same place, only much faster.

At the end of 2022, the bestselling author Stephanie Danler (Sweetbitter, Stray) wrote about trying to traverse BookTok as an author. Her experience was somewhat fraught. She wrote that TikTok is “not a social media app but an entertainment app. On it, you can’t just show a book by Clarice Lispector. The successful accounts performed being a ‘woman who reads Clarice Lispector.’” Danler also goes on to make the claim that “being visible on these apps is antithetical to the act of writing.” I find it difficult to disagree with Danler’s summation of BookTok. There is an uncanny falseness behind it all, a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia. Who doesn’t want to be seen as literary? Being perceived as having read a lot of books warrants a fair share of cultural capital. If you can fake it, then why not?

Link to the rest at GQ

From Publisher’s Weekly:

People from many different industries have watched the rapid erosion of Twitter. While it remains up and running as of this date, millions of people have abandoned or shut down their accounts for reasons ranging from owner Elon Musk’s reinstatement of former president Donald Trump’s account to overall disenchantment with the role social media plays in our lives.

But for me, Twitter has and always will be a platform that helped me find my way in book publishing, and not just because my @TheBookMaven account has more than 200,000 followers or because I created #FridayReads, which is used by book professionals of all types to share current reading choices. By “finding my way in book publishing,” I mean less my personal career than my overall views about our own industry and its changes in the 25 years I’ve written about, and worked in, the book world.

More ways exist to work in book publishing than ever before—and Twitter helped people find out about them. Twitter, a platform that originally limited posts to 140 characters, was the place where writers, authors, and book lovers wanted to hang out and share pithy thoughts about new titles, new contracts, and new colleagues.

I will never forget the first tweetup of BookExpo 2010, organized by the delightful and well-connected sales rep John Mesjak. Not only did he take care of designing special ID tags for the Twitterati involved but he found a venue that helped us all feel safe exclaiming loudly as we identified people we’d previously only known online.

There would be many more tweetups, which quickly became simply IRL encounters. Within my deliberately delimited world of writers and book people, I’ve seen a couple meet online and later marry, watched writers gain agents through answering calls for queries, and heard about hundreds of coffees and drinks and dinners arranged via DMs. Personally, I’ve eaten the best pancakes in Brooklyn while discussing reading metrics with a librarian for her dissertation and organized lunches at the Algonquin that led to long-term collaborations and friendships.

However, none of those things has kept me tweeting for nigh on 15 years; neither has the daily dopamine high from responses. What’s kept me and many of my favorite colleagues on what is often referred to as “this hellsite” is that the connection we find there has inspired us to advocate for change. Brief conversations about something that rankled might turn into larger discussions about how to make it better, be that something book contracts, bookstore practices, or submission standards.

As Twitter grew, so did the topics, including #WeNeed-DiverseBooks, #PublishingPaidMe, #ShopIndie, #ReadMore-Women. #OwnVoices, #OpenPublishing, and—my personal favorite—#DecentralizePublishing.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Yahoo Finance:

Elon Musk throwing more up against the Twitter wall and just seeing if it sticks. The latest proposal outlined in “The New York Times” has Twitter considering selling user names to generate some new revenue. Engineers have reportedly discussed running online auctions for in-demand names.

Now Elon tweeted last month that he wants to free up some of the 1.5 billion usernames that have remained inactive for a year or more. As of now, Twitter’s rules forbid the buying and selling of handles. This on– look, on the 30,000-foot view, looks like a good idea, but one that really tinkers with the margins. How significant could the revenue be for selling a few–

. . . .

I really think that it speaks to the larger picture of . . . the dire straits that it seems like Twitter is in at this point. They’re really struggling to diversify their revenue. They’re kind of throwing anything– everything against the wall and really seeing what sticks.

Link to the rest at Yahoo Finance

From The Atlantic:

It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.

Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.

The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.

A long time ago, many social networks walked the Earth. Six Degrees launched in 1997, named after a Pulitzer-nominated play based on a psychological experiment. It shut down soon after the dot-com crash of 2000—the world wasn’t ready yet. Friendster arose from its ashes in 2002, followed by MySpace and LinkedIn the next year, then Hi5 and Facebook in 2004, the latter for students at select colleges and universities. That year also saw the arrival of Orkut, made and operated by Google. Bebo launched in 2005; eventually both AOL and Amazon would own it. Google Buzz and Google+ were born and then killed. You’ve probably never heard of some of these, but before Facebook was everywhere, many of these services were immensely popular.

Content-sharing sites also acted as de facto social networks, allowing people to see material posted mostly by people they knew or knew of, rather than from across the entire world. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, was one; YouTube—once seen as Flickr for video—was another. Blogs (and bloglike services, such as Tumblr) raced alongside them, hosting “musings” seen by few and engaged by fewer. In 2008, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink published a book about blogs and social networks whose title summarized their average reach: Zero Comments.

Today, people refer to all of these services and more as “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist. Many of these sites framed themselves as a part of a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,” a term that had previously meant “satisfied” when pronounced differently. But at the time, and for years, these offerings were framed as social networks or, more often, social-network services. So many SNSes proliferated, a joke acronym arose: YASN, or “yet another social network.” These things were everywhere, like dandelions in springtime.

As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts. LinkedIn promised to make job searching and business networking possible by traversing the connections of your connections. Friendster did so for personal relationships, Facebook for college mates, and so on. The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

. . . .

Social networks’ evolution into social media brought both opportunity and calamity. Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach. Ordinary folk could now make some money or even a lucrative living “creating content” online. The platforms sold them on that promise, creating official programs and mechanisms to facilitate it. In turn, “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.

The ensuing disaster was multipart. For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.

Obsession fueled the flames. Compulsion had always plagued computer-facilitated social networking—it was the original sin. Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships. It was just as common to obsess over having 500-plus connections on LinkedIn in 2003 as it is to covet Instagram followers today. But when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale. And the values associated with scale—reaching a lot of people easily and cheaply, and reaping the benefits—became appealing to everyone: a journalist earning reputational capital on Twitter; a 20-something seeking sponsorship on Instagram; a dissident spreading word of their cause on YouTube; an insurrectionist sowing rebellion on Facebook; an autopornographer selling sex, or its image, on OnlyFans; a self-styled guru hawking advice on LinkedIn. Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

. . . .

As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I’ve been dreading this post, but not for the reason that you think. Somewhere, probably back in November, I had gotten the bright idea that I would do this post and find a social media site to replace Twitter for my promotion and news needs.

(As a former journalist, I found Twitter very useful. I followed journalists in real time, as well as old journalist friends, who would post nuggets, and I knew how to parse those nuggets. The unfiltered nuggets (in tiny bursts) is what I miss about Twitter, not the promotion, not the “social” aspect, not the “community” which I never found very welcoming in the first place. Anyway.)

In other words, I had put a lot of pressure on this post. I was sure that with a week or so worth of research, I’d have a new social media home.

I didn’t expect two things. The first is that nothing has really shaken out as the Twitter replacement. (And Musk hasn’t quit nor has he finished eviscerating the site, even after he promised he’d step down if people told him to…and people told him to.) The second thing is…I’m not sure I want a Twitter replacement. Yes, I miss the news (see above), but I don’t miss the hordes of judgement that would come with any kind of infraction or perceived infraction.

No one ever checked to see if the infraction actually did happen, as was the case with me getting banned by a lot of sf people because they believed that I had never done anything to help women in the field. Never bought stories from women when I was editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (an easy thing to disprove) and never wrote about women’s issues anywhere (also easy to disprove). And yeah, that was the first attack that really bothered me, mostly because I ended up blocking a whole bunch of people whose work I like and whose politics I generally agree with.

It bothered me for days, before I put on my sf convention armor and remembered that social media is like a large party, and I needed my game face on at all times.

I’m not fond of my game face. It goes against my rather blunt grain.

So I’m not going to use this post to find the next Twitter or the place where all the literary folk have gathered. I’m probably going to need to find a few places to land, but that’s separate research unrelated to this piece. In this piece, I’ll look at the changes in the social media landscape and what that means for the future.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

From Slate:

“Everyone always asks, so here you go,” Aaliyah Aroha wrote in the caption of what would go on to become one of her most popular TikTok videos. She appears, lip-syncing to a song from the app-favorite Unofficial Bridgerton Musical and holding a stack of books, as the words “Enemies to Lovers book recommendations” float overhead. The video, posted to her account, @aaliyahreads, which boasts over 216,000 followers, now has 2.5 million views and more than 431,000 likes.

Many book lovers who are in the market for their next read—especially readers who stick to genres like romance and fantasy—turn first to accounts like this. TikTok is teeming with book influencers like Aroha (her last name is a pseudonym), who use their platforms to peddle new releases, make book recommendations, share reviews, and more. But in 2021 and 2022, these content creators found a new way to hack the algorithm—and in turn, the publishing industry. That is, until they began to wonder if they had created a monster.

Among genre readers and editors, depending on whom you ask and their level of involvement with the internet, they’ll register tropes (refer to Merriam-Webster dictionary’s second definition—“a common or overused theme or device”) as the tags used to categorize fan fiction on the site Archive of Our Own (also known as AO3), the backbone of the tremendous fan wiki tvtropes.org, or the internal lingo used in publishing offices to discuss new releases. On TikTok, tropes have become an internet shorthand to help people find their next read. Creators have hacked the phenomenon that is BookTok by using these tropes— “enemies to lovers,” “morally gray main characters,” “fake dating” (the trope where characters must present a facade of affection to​​ the world but end up actually in love—see Simon and Daphne in Bridgerton), “love triangles”—as search engine optimization terms to package their content and convey the “vibe” of a book.

And it works, too. “People want to get straight to the point, so they can read more and read what they know they like,” Aroha said in an email. “It’s a smart way to adjust to the way of society today. I also believe that it’s kept books alive, and people actively wanting to read.”

There’s certainly an audience for it. On TikTok, videos using #EnemiesToLovers as a tag have a total of 4.2 billion views, while #EnemiesToLoversBooks has 78.2 million. Books like It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover (#FriendsToLovers), The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (#FakeDating, #GrumpySunshine), and People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (#FriendsToLovers) became print bestsellers in 2022 after being promoted across the app using these trope tags. There’s almost no avoiding it—trope-ification plays a key part in BookTok’s influence on the publishing industry, especially for the fantasy, YA, and romance genres.

This shorthand categorizes books in a hyper-specific way. On BookTok, romance readers can find a book in which the love interests are forced to share a bed, or fantasy readers can read books with a superpowered main female character (known online as a “magical girl”) or a protagonist who is the “chosen one.” This categorization allows fans to cherry-pick their own adventures or particular happily-ever-afters. It also streamlines the process of picking out books—and creating bestsellers.

Link to the rest at Slate

From Nieman Lab:

“Predicting the end of social platforms is the ultimate expression of a secret desire to put them back in the attic because we fear we will never quite learn how to use them.”

It seems that another one of those recurring news cycles when we talk about the “end of social media” is upon us. It happens almost once a year, like the holiday season. Yes, for those short of memory, this is not the first time such millenarist titles have been used.

Some headlines predicted the end of social media after scandals like Cambridge Analytica in 2018 or Facebook’s announced pivot to private messaging in 2019. Others forecast a new beginning for social media in the metaverse after Facebook’s rebranding as Meta last year.

Of course, there have been headlines about the death of specific platforms too. We read about the uncertain future of Twitter most recently, as #RIPTwitter gathered numbers in November. Many had probably forgotten that #RIPTwitter initially appeared in 2016, with doom-and-gloom predictions around the end of Twitter when Jack Dorsey decided to include an algorithm-based feed on the platform.

In 2018 the end of Tumblr was near, caused by content moderation that interrupted the pornographic lifeline of the platform. But fast forward to 2022, and Tumblr is still alive. Once the poster child of quirky blogging, Tumblr is apparently attracting Gen Z users — the same audience many commentators put in the doomscrolling-on-TikTok box.

Here’s my guess: for many commentators, predicting the end of social platforms is — consciously or not — the ultimate expression of a secret desire to put them back in the attic because we fear we will never quite learn how to use them.

Though writing this op-ed as part of a series called Predictions for Journalism, future-telling is not my area of expertise. So, I don’t know if 2023 is the year when social media will be over or not. As a guiding principle, I tend to be skeptical about any such turning points in the media industry.

The core argument supporting this latest end-of-social-media wave is the different approach TikTok has to content distribution. Since TikTok shows us content that is not published only by people we follow, for many, this is enough to make TikTok something completely different from other social platforms — an entertainment-focused platform that pivots around suggesting content based on users’ behavior more than on their networks.

Are we sure about this chasm between TikTok and the rest of the social platforms? Are TikTok’s way of distributing content and its stronger focus on entertainment enough to make the term “social” in “social media” fade?

Historically, entertainment has been fundamental in building communities and connecting people. In addition, I would argue that TikTok is not just an entertainment platform, given that it also offers news, educational content, and more.

TikTok doesn’t only suggest content based on the user’s behavior. Everyone has access to a feed featuring only content posted by people they follow. Despite views being the primary metrics of the platform, TikTok’s average engagement rate is very high.

Plus, if conversations aren’t crucial for TikTok, it’s hard to explain why TikTok was the first platform to imagine a tool to create content starting from people’s public comments — one of the most popular features on the platform.

So, if TikTok is still a social platform, though a very peculiar one, why have columnists and journalists been so ready to predict impending doom on social platforms?

Social platforms are evolving and we keep predicting their end simply because we are looking too closely at their evolution, mistaking their changes for endpoints. Social media are online platforms that allow the exchange of content among users, thereby connecting them as a network. It’s a powerful, world-shattering idea, and however many forms it will take in the future, the end of social media as an idea seems very unlikely, at least in the near future.

Link to the rest at Nieman Lab

From Book Riot:

I’ve been on the bookish internet for more than 15 years, and in that time, I’ve watched platforms rise and fall. I remember talking about books on Livejournal, for Sappho’s sake. I started a book blog called the Lesbrary in 2011, because I couldn’t find an LGBTQ book blog that wasn’t 90% M/M books. Of course, I started an accompanying Tumblr for it at about the same time, because I spent most of my time there. Years later, I’d join BookTube, and years after that, I even gave BookTok a try for a bit before slowly backing away.

Over that time, I saw the bookish internet grow and evolve, allowing for more niche spaces (like a sapphic book blog, for instance), for different formats, for new personalities. I loved the passionate debates happening on Tumblr around representation, separating the art from the artist, and more prickly fandom disagreements…and then I loved those conversations significantly less when they popped up again and again, on Twitter and Tumblr and YouTube and TikTok, with absolutely no progress made over time.

All through these moments of dipping in and out of different bookish spaces online, though, I kept the Lesbrary. It began to seem more and more outdated. Who follows book blogs anymore? Who reads their online content anymore, instead of watching videos? (Hello, reader!) More significantly, I began to doubt whether there was a need for a sapphic book blog like mine anymore. More sapphic books are being published now than ever before, and more people are reading and promoting them. BookTok has a lively sapphic books section. I feel like I, in some small part, contributed to this environment, which I take pride in: if I can make the Lesbrary completely obsolete, I’ll be happy.

I haven’t packed up my blog and shuttered the windows, though. Because as I watched the same conversations play out over and over again on different platforms, I really started to understand how ephemeral most of them are. BookTube and BookTok are great for browsing and following, but they’re not easy to search. You might be able to find general topics (like queer books), but looking for something specific is trickier. The platforms just aren’t designed for that. TikTok especially is not meant to be a repository of knowledge, an archive of opinion. It’s a firehouse of content, and you’re meant to be keeping up with what’s new, not exploring what came before.

The newest platform is also usually populated with young voices, especially teenagers and people in their early 20s. Most of them have not lived through the Livejournal days, and they’re not digging into the WayBackMachine to see what was happening in their corner of the internet before they got there — I certainly never did. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does have some pitfalls, like repeating the exact same mistakes as the platform that came before, with the same arguments and schisms emerging.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

From Yahoo Tech:

For the first time since YouTube started reporting its advertising revenue in 2019, the video platform saw a slowdown last quarter, with ad revenue dropping to $7.07 billion from $7.2 billion in Q3 2021.

Creators, though, seem to have been spared big drops in their rates.

Insider spoke with a number of creators to see how their earnings from YouTube’s ad revenue share program have changed over time. Most reported that their revenue per mille (RPM) rate — or earnings per 1,000 views — have stayed steady year over year.

Some creators, like Joshua Mayo, even saw their RPMs grow.

“It’s grown to this massive business that is very lucrative, and I’m very thankful for all of it,” Mayo said, adding that his RPM rate went from around $6 in October 2021 to $29.30 in October 2022, growth that he attributes to creating creating more content around personal finance.

. . . .

Eight creators recently shared how much YouTube paid them per 1,000 views, and their answers ranged from $1.61 to $29.30.

YouTube creators can earn 55% of the revenue from Google-placed ads on their videos when they join the YouTube Partner Program, or YPP.

To qualify for the program, they must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on their long-form videos.

Link to the rest at Yahoo Tech

From Publisher’s Weekly:

TikTok has upended the conventional marketing wisdom of publishers—which holds that noncelebrities’ books have a brief time after launch to see hitmaking sales before fading into obscurity—by suddenly catapulting books that have been out for years into the spotlight and onto bestseller lists. Authors have taken notice: with TikTok boasting approximately one billion active monthly users, and with BookTok content having received 74.4 billion views and counting, that’s a lot of readership and sales potential.

Or so it would seem.

Sara Raasch is the bestselling author of the YA fantasy trilogy Snow Like Ashes, the YA fantasy duology Stream Raiders, and the duology Set Fire to the Gods, cowritten with Kristen Simmons. She joined TikTok in early 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Thanks to a handful of viral videos, Raasch’s TikTok account quickly amassed more than 80,000 followers.

“I often tried to play to TikTok trends, and just shift them to fit books and writing,” she says. “I always saw the best uptick in views when I hit trends at the right time. Trends are increasingly difficult to play to, as they come and go so fleetingly and quickly get saturated.”

With such a large platform, one would think Raasch would see a major increase in sales, but she says this is not the case for her YA novels. “Not only did I not see any boost in book sales,” she notes—“the time I was spending making TikTok content was quickly sucking up my writing time.”

Raasch says that she tried a different strategy on her pseudonym account for adult romance novels. “I have had a video go viral on my pseudonym TikTok account [which has more than 2.2 million views as of this writing], and I saw a direct bump in sales because of it.” She suggests that she spent a lot of time on her YA account branding herself, but on her pseudonym account she only posts about books and doesn’t show her face.

“The success I garnered there plays entirely into the analogy of social media as a casino,” Raasch asserts. “High engagement is the jackpot you may or may not get, but if you play the game long enough—i.e., post consistently, play to trends, etc.—you might win.” She adds that she feels the success she’s had on her pseudonym account “was entirely luck,” but she continues to post there because she’s seen the potential payout.

Dante Medema, author of YA novels Message Not Found and The Truth Project, joined TikTok in February 2021 and now has more than 83,000 followers. “I have received some pretty amazing career opportunities through TikTok,” she says, citing connections with other authors and readers and lining up interviews and speaking engagements. “Overall, I think it’s had a positive impact.”

However, she echoes Raasch’s sentiment that engagement and views will vary. “It’s easy to get discouraged,” she says. “I think it’s about understanding that not every video is going to get a bunch of likes and comments.”

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From The Atlantic:

It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.

Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.

The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.

A long time ago, many social networks walked the Earth. Six Degrees launched in 1997, named after a Pulitzer-nominated play based on a psychological experiment. It shut down soon after the dot-com crash of 2000—the world wasn’t ready yet. Friendster arose from its ashes in 2002, followed by MySpace and LinkedIn the next year, then Hi5 and Facebook in 2004, the latter for students at select colleges and universities. That year also saw the arrival of Orkut, made and operated by Google. Bebo launched in 2005; eventually both AOL and Amazon would own it. Google Buzz and Google+ were born and then killed. You’ve probably never heard of some of these, but before Facebook was everywhere, many of these services were immensely popular.

Content-sharing sites also acted as de facto social networks, allowing people to see material posted mostly by people they knew or knew of, rather than from across the entire world. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, was one; YouTube—once seen as Flickr for video—was another. Blogs (and bloglike services, such as Tumblr) raced alongside them, hosting “musings” seen by few and engaged by fewer. In 2008, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink published a book about blogs and social networks whose title summarized their average reach: Zero Comments.

Today, people refer to all of these services and more as “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist. Many of these sites framed themselves as a part of a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,” a term that had previously meant “satisfied” when pronounced differently. But at the time, and for years, these offerings were framed as social networks or, more often, social-network services. So many SNSes proliferated, a joke acronym arose: YASN, or “yet another social network.” These things were everywhere, like dandelions in springtime.

As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of the trusted contacts of trusted contacts. LinkedIn promised to make job searching and business networking possible by traversing the connections of your connections. Friendster did so for personal relationships, Facebook for college mates, and so on. The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic (via MSN)

PG expects social media to continue to evolve and develop, but doesn’t expect it to disappear anytime soon.

From Tech Crunch:

End-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a new Stories feature to all users on Android and iOS, the company announced on Monday. The official launch comes a few weeks after the company first began beta testing the feature with select users. Signal plans to release its Stories feature on desktop soon.

As with other platforms’ Stories features, Signal Stories allow users to create and share images, videos and texts that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Signal notes that like everything else in its app, Stories are end-to-end encrypted.

Signal users have the option to choose who can see their Stories by navigating to their settings. From there, you can choose to share your Stories with everyone in your phone’s contact list who uses Signal, anyone you’ve had a one-on-one conversation with in Signal or anyone whose message request you’ve accepted. You also have the option to manually hide your Story from specific people. If you would rather choose to share your Stories with a smaller subset of people, you can create a custom Story. In addition, you have the option to share Stories to existing group chats.

Link to the rest at Tech Crunch

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in… Dubai!

Dave Eggers, The Circle

From Above the Law:

It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.

Anyway, Elon’s in a bit of a different position, because rather than starting something new, he’s taken over a large platform. I recognize that he, his buddies, and a whole lot of other people think that Twitter is especially bad at this, and that he’s got some special ideas for “bringing free speech back,” but the reality is that Twitter was, by far, the most successful platform at taking a “we support free speech” stance for content, and learned over time the many nuances and tradeoffs involved.

And because I do hope that Musk succeeds and Twitter remains viable, I wanted to see if we might help him (and anyone else) speed run the basics of the content moderation learning curve that most newbies run into. The order of the levels and the seriousness of each can change over time, and how it all fits together may be somewhat different, but, in the end, basically every major social media platform ends up in this same place eventually (the place Twitter was already at when Musk insisted he needed to tear things down and start again).

Level One: “We’re the free speech platform! Anything goes!”

Cool. Cool. The bird is free! Everyone rejoice.

“Excuse me, boss, we’re getting reports that there are child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSAM) images and videos on the site.”

. . . .

Level Two: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM!”

Alright, comedy is now legal on the site. Everyone rejoice. Everyone love me.

“Um, boss. We have a huge stack of emails from Hollywood, saying something about DMCA takedowns?”

Oh right. Copyright infringement is bad. Get another intern and have them take that all down.

Level Three: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM and no infringement!”

Power to the people. Freedom is great!

“Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.”

That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech.

Level Four: “We’re the free speech platform without CSAM, infringement or hate speech!”

Bringing freedom back is hard work, but this is all going great. Do the people love me yet?

“Hey, so, the FBI is here? Something about 18 USC 2258A and how we were supposed to report all of that CSAM to some operation called NCMEC?”

Ah, right. Grab an intern and make sure they pass along those images. We obey all the laws!

Link to the rest at Above the Law

From The Economist:

In 1997, in his first letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wrote that it was still “Day 1” for his firm. Day 2, he later explained, would mean stasis, followed by irrelevance. His rousing call to avoid complacency seems apt today. Silicon Valley’s five big tech giants, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, have long been the bedrock of America’s stockmarket and economy, miraculously combining reliable growth and profitability. But after a torrid third quarter their market capitalisations have now collectively dropped by 37% so far this year. About $3.7trn of value has evaporated.

The law of large numbers made it inevitable that the tech giants would mature. Sales growth in the last quarter slowed to 9%—barely above inflation. As they have grown bigger, they have become tied to the economic cycle; a fact which the digital surge during the pandemic only temporarily masked. Penetration rates for smartphones, digital advertising and streaming are plateauing. With slowing core businesses, the giants are venturing onto each other’s turf, increasing competition.

Meanwhile, they are threatened by “conglomeritis”. The symptoms of this disease are bloating and egomania. Consider the recent orgy of spending on hiring, experimental ventures, vanity projects and building data centres. In March the five firms’ combined annual expenses reached $1trn for the first time, and the value of the physical plant of these supposedly asset-light businesses has reached $600bn, over triple the level of five years ago. Swollen costs and balance-sheets mean returns on capital have fallen from over 60% five years ago to 26%. Three of the five do not deign to pay dividends.

It is hardly unprecedented for successful companies to lose their focus, or to fail to control costs. In the 1980s rjr Nabisco’s executives splurged on jets and golf before being ousted by private equity’s barbarians. General Electric sprawled and had to be partially bailed out during the financial crisis of 2008-09. The best safeguards against such indiscipline are active boards and investors. When successful managers start to believe that they always know best, it is the board’s job to rein them in.

But here, the tech firms’ governance rules add a twist. Often they entrust disproportionate power to bosses and founders, some of whom enjoy special voting rights that give them near-absolute control. Such bosses often cultivate an image as visionaries, whose daring bets horrify myopic outsiders but end up lucratively transforming the world.

At the worst end of the spectrum is Meta, the owner of Facebook, run increasingly erratically by Mark Zuckerberg. Its value has dropped by 74% this year. Its core business is wobbly, attracting too much toxicity, too few young people and too little advertising. It has become clear that Mr Zuckerberg is betting the firm on the metaverse, an attempt to diversify away from social media, on which he plans to lavish 20 times what Apple spent to build the first iPhone. Because dual share classes give him 54% of voting rights, Mr Zuckerberg has been able to ignore the pleas of outside investors.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG notes that one-hit wonders are more quickly exposed in the music business than in the tech business.