Ever since the early 2010s, writers have felt industry pressure to grow and maintain an online presence. Twitter (now X), especially, with its rapid reaction times and robust links to online publications, seemed to function as the center of the media, journalism, and writing world. The platform could be a place for writers to form bonds with other writers that could last years, growing into real friendships and support networks, and it could also get writers scouted and noticed by publishing professionals. As a baby agent I remember a coworker at my first job gasped when I told her I didn’t have a Twitter account—“But that’s where everyone is!” (She made me get an account the next day so that I could become slowly internet-poisoned over the next eight years.) Indeed, some writers managed to leverage their online followings successfully: As Maris Kreizman recently wrote in Literary Hub, “Sometimes I can’t believe there was ever a time when I used to be able to simply tweet a hot take and an editor would ask in my DMs if I wanted to write about it for their publication. I didn’t know how good I had it!”
But as the promise of social media has curdled, particularly over the past few years, it’s a weirder time than ever to exist as a writer online. X has imploded into a cesspool of conspiracies, crypto scams, and Nazis; Facebook is mostly ads and bots; Bluesky seems to be full of chatter about how it’s not all that fun yet; I honestly have no idea what’s on Mastodon; and Instagram and TikTok, for all their popularity, are photo- and video-based in a way that can stress out authors who don’t want to make their faces the center of their personal brand. The online center of the writing world, to the extent that it existed, is gone. Do we even have to be on here at all? Is it okay to just log off and “touch grass,” as the terminally online say, or do we have to linger for the sake of our careers?
Whether or not you need to try to build a social media presence is the question I receive most commonly on panels; even before this moment, writers have felt an outsize amount of pressure to perform online in the service of building platform or a nebulous sense of community. My answer then, as now, has stayed consistent: Don’t force a social media presence just out of a sense of obligation that it’s the “thing to do” to promote yourself and your book.
The online chatter makes it easy to forget that your main job as a writer is to focus on the writing and everything that comes with it: the drafting, revising, rewriting, getting feedback, and reading broadly in your genre. Social media is secondary to that purpose. Some authors find specific social media platforms to be a fun break and a good way to connect with other writers; others find that it sucks up all their time and diverts their attention away from their craft. If you’re in the former camp, then carry on, and if you fall into the latter camp, please log off. There’s no point spending all your time cultivating an online following if your manuscript is not going to get to its strongest version as a result.
The publishing industry considers writers’ social media presences to be useful for two purposes: building a platform and building community. But “platform,” which is mostly relevant in nonfiction, isn’t just about the sheer number of online followers you amass; it’s about whether you’re considered an expert, in your own circles, for the topic that you’re writing about. Do the people who are likely to be interested know and respect your expertise on that topic? If not, where might you find them? Maybe it’s on Substack or something similar, but maybe it’s out in the real world in your professional networks or conferences. For community: Agents are generally looking for a sense that you are connected to a larger writing network of some sort, which includes both potential buyers of your book and other writers and literary tastemakers who might help champion your work in their own circles. Again, this could be online—in the vacuum left by Twitter’s disintegration, I’ve mostly seen Instagram and Bluesky fill in—but it could also very well be your critique partners or the writing group in your area. Social media platforms can facilitate connection, but they aren’t the only means to connect. Agents just want to see that you’re thinking about the audience for your specific book and genre and that you’re not writing alone in an isolated vacuum. If there’s a way to get involved in your communities online, on any platform, in a way that feels sustainable and fulfilling, then go for it. But there are so many more ways to get involved; social media represents a much smaller subset of what’s out there in the world.
Building a social media following in a way that would be meaningful for publishers, from a publicity and marketing standpoint, is a yearslong, tricky, rare process—and frankly not one I’ve ever seen happen because an author started writing a book and then decided they needed to scoop up some followers before they published it. Agents are not expecting debut writers to have tens of thousands of social media followers (besides which, we’ve had enough time with social media as an industry to realize that lots of followers does not automatically convert to lots of sales). The main thing agents want is for your book to be good, and absorbing, and ideally something that stops their own social media doomscrolling.
There’s only one online thing that I advise every writer to do if they have publishing aspirations, which is to make a simple website—Squarespace or similar can be great for doing this yourself. It gives you a central hub for storing all your short-form writing work, your biography, and your contact information, which can help agents find you if they’re curious. Then, if you want, you can log off, go touch grass, and finish writing your book.
Jade Wong-Baxter is a literary agent at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, working across adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction. Her clients have been nominated for Lambda Literary Awards and have appeared on the USA Today best-seller list.
