For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out to address the Fail Whale in the corner of the room. 

(We all still remember the Fail Whale, right? It hasn’t been so long that that we have forgotten the ancient texts?) 

Here’s the thing:

I am great at social media. 

This is not arrogance to say. It’s just a fact. I was one of the premiere Social Media Sellers named by eBay, I lived off the income of my blog and platform for several years, I had a decent following across multiple platforms on not one, but two different author personalities. Social media built my career, got me invited to conventions and podcasts, and moved inventory. 

Did having a social media presence help me sell books and items from my store? Did it open up jobs and opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise? Was it a powerful networking career that made me amazing friends and solid connections I keep to this day?

Yes, yes, and yes. 

And, for a while there, it was also a positive force in my life. I met a lot of great people through social media. For a long time, social media was my water cooler while working from home, my main social outlet during the day when it was just me and my keyboard. 

And then it started to suck. 

It’s hard to pin point exactly when it all went to hell. The exact moment when I realized that scrolling social media was a net negative in my daily routine, not just because it took up time I could better spend doing something else but also because it just bummed me out. 

And, sure, you could make the argument that it was less social media’s fault than *gestures broadly* the state of the entire world in general, but one fact remained: 

My career got something out of social media. 

I, personally, did not. 

I abandoned Facebook first. I haven’t logged in for years, though I can’t delete the account entirely since so many games and apps force you to use it as a login (hatessss it, precious). 

I set my Twitter to inactive during COVID lockdown, realized I really didn’t miss it, and fully deleted all my accounts when Musk took over and sent it right down the toilet.

I do have accounts on Instagram, Threads and Bluesky, but those are mostly just for name parking / discovery. When I do post to any of those sites (ditto my Facebook page), that content is either syndicated directly from my blog or posted through a third party app like Buffer so I can share stuff without having to actually log in. The only social media I actually “hang out” on is Discord with a small group of good friends and a handful of bigger groups I can dip in or out of as needed. 

There’s another part of this, one that is less about being on social media in general but specifically having a larger platform when you’re a woman. One of the big reasons I changed this pen name to be more gender neutral is that I got a LOT of abuse and creepy old men harassing me, far more than I felt comfortable talking about online. As soon as you have a larger platform, there’s a bit of a target on your back until you feel like you can’t even point to the bullies without someone jumping in to victim blame that it’s your fault for daring to exist on the internet in the first place. 

I had a creepy stalker who didn’t like that I left a balanced review of a website he had a parasocial thing going on with and harped on it for months. A co-worker of a family member used details of our personal life I eluded to in blog posts to harass them at work. Far too many people felt comfortable demanding free work or favors then exploding when I politely refused, because they had some mistaken belief that simply having a lot of followers meant I was somehow independently wealthy with unlimited free time to write their amazing book idea for them or donate my labor for free. 

Everyone these days seems to want to go viral, but no one really wants to deal with the reality of what it means when thousands of strangers want to weigh in on everything you write, many of which will never actually read your real words and instead just react on what they think you said. The internet is a very different place when you can goof around with friends or chat freely vs when you have to overthink everything you post because someone is going to misinterpret / put words in your mouth / use innocuous tidbits to abuse your family members. And, especially when I became a parent, posting under my real name became downright stressful because I never knew when some innocent comment would turn into a whole big thing.* 

On top of that, the algorithm became intolerable. Social media is increasingly pay to play and even if you fork out the extra cash for premium or increased exposure, you can still be shadow-banned if you use the wrong keyword or include a link on a platform that suppresses them.

It’s like a game where the rules keep changing and it stopped being fun. 

So I walked away.

And, god, was it like a weight lifted. 

But there was a trade off. 

I’m not as easy to find for opportunities. I’ve lost touch with friends who are only active on platforms I’ve abandoned. Losing a big chunk of my network effects how much I can sell, especially when I’m not playing the algorithm game enough for the people who do still follow me to see my stuff. 

When my new book came out earlier this year was the first time I regretted deleting my Twitter account because I didn’t have that ready made list of 5k followers I could promote to. 

It felt like starting from scratch. 

Yes, I know how to do social media. No, I don’t want to do it anymore. 

The problem is, just because I have personally changed my relationship to social media, doesn’t mean I lost the knowledge I collected to succeed at it in the first. Between my past success with my e-commerce platform and my breakaway success as an international bestselling playwright under my other pen name, people want to hear what I have to say on the subject of building a platform and using it to market your stuff. I’m frequently hired to teach and talk about the topic of social media, online marketing or building a platform online… while fully acknowledging all the reasons why I personally stepped back despite the benefits.

It’s, frankly, awkward.  

Social Media on my terms: how your message finds me

Which brings me to where I am these days. 

Yes, I’m still on a bunch of social media sites in the sense that I post things there sometimes and, if you reply or DM, I’ll see it when I next sign on, but I’m definitely not logged on to the extent I used to be. When it comes to posting, my first destination is going to be my blogs (with my main blog more active than this one simply because that’s where I post all my upcoming releases and events), but links to content from all my sites with syndicate automatically to everywhere I have an account so you’ll still see updates there if you don’t follow the blog directly. 

It’s being online without being “very online” and if the trade off is ultimately selling less, I think I’m alright with that for the overall benefit to my mental health and how much time it’s freed up for getting actual work done. 

That said, it doesn’t mean I’m not still the same social creature I’ve always been so if you still want to chat, feel free to send me a message either as a reply on here, email or on social. (Well, except for Facebook, if you send me a message there it goes to die in obscurity because that website is NOT functional.) I’ve got a lot of big stuff going on right now and another new pen name so e-commerce has taken a back seat to my fiction career at the moment, but I’m always selling and living that Whine Seller life and will be popping in between projects to still post articles here from time to time.

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* = One of the last straws for me on Twitter was when I replied to a friend's tweet about how sometimes her pediatrician gives bewildering advice by replying with the story of how ours-- upon hearing that my then 2 year old absolutely loved raw broccoli-- told her that she was eating it wrong and she should be covering it in melted cheese. And when my child told him this sounded gross (melted cheese was a sensory "nope" for her back then), the doctor outright scolded her that she was eating it wrong and broccoli was better with cheese until she got upset while I sat there like "Bro, she already likes broccoli as is and happily eats her veggies, what are you hoping to accomplish here by bullying her into eating them with cheese???" 

So naturally, someone hopped into this private reply with a multi-tweet rant about how the doctor was "based" and to accuse me of "abusing my daughter by denying her cheese" which is the kind of amazing combo of bad faith and outright mis-reading that came to typify the Musk Twitter era. And, sure, I can just block that guy (as I did), but that doesn't change the fact that it's GD annoying to not be able to so much as have a normal conversation with a friend without having to worry about Guy Who's a Little Into Cheese on Broccoli harassing you and your friends over an anecdote.

That's the experience you get when you have a big social media presence.