Social media and the writer's happiness

Every writer knows you've got to be on social media if you want to sell books. Some would even suggest it impacts your ability to get published in the first place, and I'd say this isn't too far out there as an idea. I've definitely come across publishers I've sent my book proposals to who cared at least as much about my social media reach as the book itself. 

A few weeks ago, I turned my Facebook off, as I often do at the holidays in order to avoid adding to the melancholy I always feel at how little I think I've achieved in my life by seeing how much other people have done. However, a publisher who seemed interested in a book I pitched to him asked last week about whether I was on Facebook. He told me they published authors as well as books. I thought he was concerned about my social media reach for its ability to sell books, but turns out what he really wanted was just to know more about me and what kind of person I am. Either way, I turned my Facebook back on, and all the benefits I'd been enjoying of being off went away. 

Facebook is really nothing, though, compared to Twitter when it comes to creating anxiety. With Facebook, I at least mostly know the people I'm looking at feeds for, which limits how personally I take what I see. If I know the guy posting something is a knucklehead from Canton, I can kind of write it off, but on Twitter, I'm subjected to a non-stop cross-section of thoughts from random people. Mostly, it leaves me with the impression that democracy is doomed. Rather than the questions of whether I'm a personal failure Facebook gives me, Twitter makes me ask what it matters whether I accomplish anything, because the whole world's screwed, anyway.

I've never been on social media to sell books. I was on Facebook back before I even tried writing seriously. My Twitter account, on the other hand, only exists for writing, but my goal isn't to get rich as a writer. The only reason I ever write anything, whether it's a story, a blog post, an email at work or a love note, is to say: the world seems thus to me, am I missing something? I generally write out of a sense that the world is fucking with me, that I'm being gaslit, because conventional wisdom says one thing, but that's not how I perceive the world. I write, generally, out of a sense that either the world is crazy or I am, and I genuinely want to know which it is. I don't necessarily want to SELL books, but I do want readers, because without someone to respond to what I'm observing, nobody can enter into a conversation about whether things seem the same way to them.

Given that I need readers to fully scratch the itch that made me write in the first place, I've figured that having a social media account was a necessary evil, a tradeoff of a little bit of sanity for the more critical big of sanity that comes from being able to talk about what matters to me with someone. (This is why I'm sometimes surprised when writers don't respond at all after I tag them on Twitter about a positive review. Like, you write literary fiction. It's not like you've got thousands of people reviewing your work. I know, because often, my blog is the top Google result for your story. I'm on Twitter to find readers who think seriously about the things I write. So aren't you happy enough to hear from a serious reader that it means at least something to you? I realize I'm offering it gratuitously, but I'm surprised, I guess, that only maybe one in four posts gets even a thumbs-up.)

I'm not sure, though, that Twitter is a good bargain overall. At least one publisher out there has written a pretty convincing argument for why authors shouldn't be on social media. I agree with all three of their reasons: 1) people don't pay much attention to writers on social media anymore, 2) it takes away time from writing, 3) the anxiety it causes will hurt you personally and as a writer. 

Most writers probably need a fair amount of solitude. That doesn't mean they're necessarily "introverted," a word I increasingly think is stupid, just that thinking about the things they think about means the world needs to shut up sometimes. Certainly, there are times when the author doesn't want solitude. For centuries, writers have sought out other minds to challenge them and shared drinks, drugs, and bodily fluids with those other minds. I'm certainly willing to sacrifice solitude to engage with a thoughtful reader, but Twitter seems like an increasingly bad bargain. 

Does this mean I'll be able to ditch it sometime soon? I don't know. Like I said, just last week, someone was interested in something I wrote, and that interest was at least partly conditional on whether I had some sort of social media existence. If I weren't a writer, I think I'd likely be the sort of person who surfs back and forth between having social media and not having it. It's convenient for some things, but it does have an impact on my happiness. 

It's not like I have a ton of followers or anything. I have 71 followers on Twitter. I don't really seek them out, which I guess defeats the purpose of being on in the first place. I'm just motivated enough to do Twitter badly, I guess. I should probably either be all-in or all-out, but I don't really see my relationship to it changing soon.