by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Or should that be Wither Social Media?

A couple of months ago I wrote about the scourge of phishing, bot-generated emails sent to writers with books on Amazon, purporting to be from marketing gurus who can get your book “the attention it deserves” or some such. Generated from a cubicle in some foreign land, what they want is your money and access to your KDP (and even bank) account. The bot-letter starts with a dopamine hit on how great your book is, adding some details scraped from the internet to make it sound like they’ve actually given your book a careful reading. (Hint: no live, human marketing professional finds random books and gives them a careful reading, then crafts a client-seeking email.)

I and many authors I know get these daily. But there’s been a new development. Skynet AI keeps training itself, and knows that authors have warned their fellows about this scam. So I had a good laugh other day when I got one of these that eschewed a fake professional style and generated a cutesy, I’m-cool-and-fun-and-down-with-the-kids type voice. What really got me chortling was this paragraph:

Before you picture me as another one of those “promo bots” crawling out of the algorithm swamp, relax. I’m Alisa, and I run a community of book-hungry readers who devour stories like yours and actually leave honest, detailed reviews (yes, human ones, no Mars-based bots or shady smoke-filled deals involved).

Got that? A bot assuring me it’s not a bot! Which got me thinking about just how we’re going to be able to judge what’s real and what’s not in the years ahead.

Now we have “AI social media.” Whatever that means, it probably means “kissing reality goodbye.”

OpenAI released the Sora app on Tuesday, just days after Meta released a similar product as part of its Meta AI platform. NPR took an early look and found that OpenAI’s app could easily generate very realistic videos, including of real individuals (with their permission). The early results are both wowing and worrying researchers.

“You can create insanely real looking videos, with your friends saying things that they would never say,” said Solomon Messing, an associate professor at New York University in the Center for Social Media and Politics. “I think we might be in the era where seeing is not believing.”

More:

“We’re really seeing the ability to kind of whole-cloth generate incredibly realistic, hyper-realistic content in any kind of different way you want,” said Henry Ajder, the head of Latent-Space Advisory, which tracks the evolution of AI-generated content.

As concerned as he is with people being duped, Ajder said he’s also very concerned about the consequences of nobody trusting what they see online.

“We have to resist the somewhat nihilistic pull of, ‘we can’t tell what’s real anymore, and therefore it doesn’t matter anymore,'” he said.

The astute publishing expert Thomas Umstaddt, Jr. was recently a guest on the Writing Off Social podcast talking about social media.

Thomas: The metaphor I like to use is that social media is like a sporting event. The people in the stands are shouting as loud as they can, but just because you are shouting louder than everyone else doesn’t make you famous on social media.

Social media only works for the people on the field. If you’re the quarterback, for instance, social media works for you. The same goes for major brands like Coca-Cola that advertise in the stadium. But regular fans in the crowd can’t get famous on social media. It’s an illusion. Buying a ticket doesn’t make the crowd listen to you.

That’s how social media works for most authors. You can’t expect to shout about your book amongst all the other shouting and get people to listen.

Sandy: It’s an illusion of access. You think you have access to all 5.24 billion people who are on social media.

Thomas: Many of those are AI bots.

Sandy: True. Regardless, you go there and think you have access to billions of people, when in reality, you only have access to a handful. The people who see your content are the ones immediately around you who can actually hear you. That’s it.

So what are we as authors to do with social media? The early counsel was to jump in with both feet (or both hands on the keyboard, as it were), on as many platforms as you can, because of the “reach billions” hype. Ha! No. We are in the stands at a Seattle Seahawks game, and the people in the adjoining seats can barely hear us when we scream.

Does social media make any difference (meaning, does it sell books?) TikTok is the latest rage, but there’s a tsunami of content there and getting through that noise is even worse than in a packed stadium. (I once threatened my daughter by telling her I was going to start doing “dad-dancing” videos on TikTok. She said, in all seriousness, “That can work. You could really go viral, Pop.”)

Um, no.

Social media has never been a place to sell books. If you have the right book, the right market, and the right reach, maybe you can move a few copies. But the truth remains: unless the book itself is so good that the last chapter sells your next book, you’ve spun a lot of wheels and invested a lot of time for little return.

My advice early on was to pick one social media platform you enjoy, and major in that, but not with a string of “buy my book” posts. I subscribe to the 90/10 rule, with the 90 being welcome, non-commercial content, and the 10 about your books. Make 100 percent of it fun to read. Don’t become yet another scold about some political or cultural hobbyhorse. It’s not good for the ol’ psyche.

FWIW, my social media footprint has been X (formerly Twitter), but I’m most active now on my Substack, which is a blend of newsletter and mini-social community (i.e., comments). It is there that I post another kind of writing I call “Whimsical Wanderings” as an oasis from the screaming mimi-dom of most social media today.

But I always keep writing books the main thing.

What about you? What’s your view of social media for authors? How much time do you spend on it? Any advice you’d like to offer?