The Platform is Always the Problem

TikTok was never going to last. Even if it’s back now, there should be a lesson to be learned about building a career off of a platform.

I’ll expound further, because I like to hone my focus here. BookTok was never going to last. Sure, in a few days’ time, this might seem presumptuous and inaccurate. As of this writing, TikTok went down briefly with frankly embarrassing messages claiming Trump would fix it, then service was returned on Sunday, although the app isn’t available on app stores. It’s all smoke, mirrors and sorta ridiculous. The fact this is our reality is sad. Regardless, TikTok might not really disappear for good, but it also… might? It’s a terrible idea to tether your career to a platform like this.

Creative industries have always followed trends with social media sites. Hell, I still remember Halsey having an argument with their label at the time, where the label essentially held a new track hostage unless it trended on TikTok.

You ever wonder why you can use actual music on the platform for the videos? That’s not magic. That’s Spotify having a licensing deal with the platform. Much like the music industry embedded itself in the very heart of TikTok, the publishing industry found a new platform to promote books thanks to enthusiastic users. The user base of mostly younger women sharing their favorite romance reads helped make BookTok culturally relevant. Hell, someone like Colleen Hoover became a household name thanks to the BookTok community. There are plenty of others, although most of the success of the platform seems confined to romance, fantasy, romantasy and related genres. It’s gotten to where if you’re in publishing, you can’t help but hear about BookTok and if you’re an author, you’re going to have someone enthusiastically tell you to get on TikTok because it sells books. I mean, it does if the audience is there, but another story for another day, right?

At a certain point, TikTok came to an agreement with most of the major publishers to sell books directly via TikTok. Hell, you could tag a book just like you could tag a song in there, which goes above and beyond what any other social app that wasn’t exclusively book related ever had to offer. So yes, it’s quite a force of nature.

Here’s the problem, though. You don’t own TikTok. You don’t have access to that audience outside of TikTok. If you wanted to email your TikTok followers to tell them about your new release, you couldn’t. As of right now, you can’t even post a video about your book to that site if you’re inside the US. That might change in a matter of days, but for how long? Even if it comes back, what if it’s bought out by some awful investment bank and there’s a sudden pressure to monetize and enshittify the platform like all the rest? What if TikTok didn’t go away, but got really shitty in a hurry?

Let me tell you a story.

In 2008, myself and my friend Fraser took a leap to write about professional kickboxing. We both wrote about Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) but loved kickboxing and would lament about the lack of coverage in English. So, we were gonna do it ourselves. We did. It got big enough that SportsBlogNation (SBNation, now owned by Vox Media) wanted us to be a part of their network. We joined. The money wasn’t great, but we got paid to write about this stuff and had a bigger name network propping us up, which helped make our little site incredibly popular. When the contract came up, we got a better offer from another site, MiddleEasy, and we took it. Things eventually worked out to where I was taking the site independent, and Fraser couldn’t make the time to keep things up.

The site continued to grow. In fact, the site was renowned in some spaces, infamous in others, but influential within the sport of professional kickboxing. Sure, it’s a niche audience, and if you think you know about professional kickboxing, unless when I say K-1, Peter Aerts, Sem Schilt, Buakaw Banchamek, Glory Kickboxing and so forth and you know what I’m talking about, you probably don’t. It’s a niche sport, but thanks to social media, I’d post a news article and within an hour I’d have thousands of unique views on that article. I was doing serious traffic and the ad money was good, not great, but good enough to where I could do this with someone else partnering with me in a 50/50 split and we’d both do pretty well. I’d get name-dropped on the Joe Rogan podcast. Industry heavies would call me to ask about what gym to train at, and the name ‘LiverKick’ meant something to people in the industry.

Then, something weird happened.

Facebook, one of the main drivers of traffic, changed things up. No longer would stories get organic reach upon being posted. If I had 20,000 fans of my Facebook page, I’d reach a minuscule fraction of these people now. A post that would get 10,000 unique views within hours was now struggling to reach 1,000. Buying ad space on my site was at one point a no brainer for gear companies, and other industry brands. Until it wasn’t. I was able to keep the site running for a few more years, but I took side jobs I swore I’d never bother with and running the site while the kickboxing industry itself struggled, knowing my traffic was virtually nonexistent beyond the hardest of hardcore fans made little sense. I lost every ounce of my passion for the sport and packed it in finally in 2019.

The reason I kept going for so long was interesting, too. Because something else happened. I was working as a contracted freelancer for Uproxx in 2016 and making what I’d consider pretty good money for writing mostly junk. We had newborn twins at home, and something was happening with Facebook. Videos were suddenly getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views out of nowhere. If it made sense that advertisers went where the hits were, the hits were clear with video. Uproxx, like many other digital publishers, fresh off of Facebook’s algorithm changes and the necessity to spend tens of thousands of dollars on advertising per month to drive the same amount of traffic prior to the changes, was scared and had to “pivot to video.” That meant laying off something like 70% of their writers. That included me.

Twice I had a steady career writing that, at the whims of social media enshittifying, had said careers derailed. I had trusted the platforms too much, and the punishment was constant pain and turmoil. Watching authors excitedly talking about TikTok, and how it completely turned the tides for many authors by sheer force of will and posting constant content, I couldn’t help but get that pit in my stomach. I’d lived through similar booms and been completely decimated when things changed not once, but twice.

The difference this time was there were people like me out there, saying “if you don’t own the platform, it’s not your audience,” and the allure of creating content for the app under the hopes of breaking through on BookTok was too hard to ignore. So, people went all in and now here we are, where authors no longer have access to TikTok, coming hot off the heels of Twitter going from a dump to a toxic waste dump. It feels like there’s nothing certain about publishing. The publishing industry had adjusted so much of its efforts into this one social media platform. It wasn’t just the indie authors. It was the big name publishers riding the gravy train.

Let me be abundantly clear here: the platforms don’t give a shit about you. They don’t care about your content. If you disappear, someone else will be there to take your place. Maybe your audience will remember your name if you disappear one day. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s someone new there providing exactly the same type of stuff, only with their name on the cover, and that person moves on to a new author. There is undoubtedly money in following these trends and taking advantage of hot social media apps, but at the end of the day, if the app were to disappear, how could you contact your audience? How would you avoid being forgotten?

Experimenting on a platform or using it to interact with the world is fine. Relying on it as a means to survive, on the other hand, will always be fleeting. Learn a lesson here.

There’s perhaps an irony that I’m publishing this on a platform, huh?

“This isn’t meant to last

This is for right now”