Last Sunday as we were hunkering down for the snowpocalypse, I logged into my favorite resource for authors and indie authors, only to be greeted by a pop-up offering a trade–entry for the small price of all of your data. They weren’t even sneaky, they spelled out every way they wanted to track and sell your information.
My answer was no.
It wasn’t a surprise, really. The worst people in existence are currently running our country—a ring of corrupt businessmen, and women, thieving in plain sight, and held together by their love of power, money, and pedophilia.
To be clear, anyone not calling for their heads is complicit. Full stop.
And now TikTok is in their hands. I’d spent two years building my platform. While it wasn’t a lot when compared to some, that was 2500 people who liked me enough to follow my content, my journey, my stupid videos talking about writing. Hopefully, some of those will follow me to Bluesky and Instagram.
In the meantime, I feel like an addict. I keep looking for the icon to click and get my fix. TikTok had an unmatched algorithm, supplying the content you wanted, always. It knew, and it was almost always correct. After the first platform shutdown, it came back, but not…right. It was like it had been buried in Pet Semetary. It looked the same, just a little rough around the edges, and maybe it didn’t act quite the same. It began pushing TT Shop more, especially special edition bibles and Christian apparel, for which I was absolutely not the audience for. Advertisements for jelly bras and vibration plates showed up in every fifth video. Still, it was better than Instagram and their glut of AI Reels. Meta doesn’t seem to use their AI for anything but data collection, as their algorithm is terrible. Two minutes after I log into Instagram, I’m over my desire to watch book-centric videos. Mostly because I’ve seen two videos from authors, seven about pimple popping, and a handful about things I’m completely uninterested in. Who knows, maybe this will keep me writing more and off the socials. Although, really, 70% of your job as an indie author is to market the books, which requires social media that works correctly. But, it needs to be one that people actually want to interact with.
So, marketing will have to wait. The country has bigger issues right now than whether or not someone reads one of my mysteries. We’ve got protests to plan, letters to write, and phone calls to make. It seems that I’ll have more time for all of that, now.
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