What if you found out that the main reason most people are on social media is not that they like it, but only because they feel they have no choice?
That’s the surprising finding of a 2023 study in which 1,000 US college students were asked how much they’d be willing to pay to use Twitter and Instagram. The answer: $59 and $47 monthly.
But hold up. When asked what those college students would pay if two-thirds of their fellow students deactivated accounts, they said they’d pay nothing.
Actually, it’s more surprising than that. The students said they’d pay less than nothing.
As in: the students would pay money not to use social media.
I had to read that finding twice before it sank in.
Half of Instagram users said they wish they lived in a world without Instagram.
You know how we keep hearing that younger generations love TikTok? Not in this study.
The TikTokkers would pay even more to be off TikTok than the Instagrammers would pay to be off Instagram.
As the University of Chicago study’s authors reported, these findings make no sense to an economist. A rational human wouldn’t pay monthly to not have a refrigerator, for example. We don’t buy things and hate them and offer to keep paying for them—if not with actual dollars, then with our time and our data and our eyeballs and our souls and our democracy.
Megabestselling author Colleen Hoover, who became famous on TikTok, recently changed her account to private and told a reporter she can’t get the haters out of her head anymore. She may have stopped writing. TikTok helped make her. Now it’s unmaking her.
“Before, release days were kind of fun because I felt like I was writing for the people that love my books, but now it’s almost like I’m writing for the people who are just waiting to put out that negative video of my books, because it gets views. It’s just the popular thing, to hate, right now, and I wish I didn’t let that get in my head, but I do. Because at this point I’m like: It doesn’t sound fun anymore. Release days don’t sound fun. So I’ve been dragging my feet. It used to be so exciting, and now it’s not. And that’s the saddest part.”
Can you imagine any product so crappy that even the people who have made millions of dollars from it have begun to hate it?
If you say that you enjoy social media, I get it, because I used to love Instagram. I made real and lasting friends there, and I got most of my latest book’s blurbs due to IG connections, and I delighted in the kindness shown to me and my books by readers and booksellers on that platform. But now, like the college kids, I realize that the bad far outweighs the good.
Even so, we are led to believe that we should continue accepting the bad. If you are a writer, you may feel like you’d better use social media to promote your career because if you haven’t used every tool at your disposal, failure will be your fault.
Except…
Except we all keep saying that author- and publisher-driven social media doesn’t sell books.
What to do about it?
I quit. Just after the election, I reduced my news consumption to save my sanity, and then I deactivated my X account—something I’d been threatening to do even before we all realized the full dark power of Elon Musk—and then I took the Instagram app off my phone. My thumb continues to pause above my phone screen, wondering if it needs to click something, but I haven’t posted since.
The weird thing wasn’t how hard it was to stay off.
The really weird thing was how easy it was to stay off.
I was so worried I’d have a crash in dopamine levels that I actually started a new hobby—cold-dipping in the ocean for about 2-5 freezing minutes, usually at night because I wait for my husband to get home from the work, about every other day. I accepted this form of torture and post-torture euphoria into my life because I thought my brain would need it. But funny thing, I wasn’t tempted to use social media for personal use even once after Nov. 17.
No one told me that social media would be so easy to quit.
No one told me that my life as an author wouldn’t come to a screeching halt if I quit.
No one told me that I could leave the game and keep my prizes—the friends and connections I’d made, with whom I will attempt to maintain connections via Substack and email.
No one told me that for the very first time in my life, I’d approach New Year’s Eve with one resolution already ticked off the list. When has that ever happened?
I’m not telling you to get off social media.
But I am telling you that you can choose to get off social media or use it much, much less than you do. You don’t even have to pay for the right to quit, as those college students were willing to do. You don’t have to explain to your agent.
(Everything thinks agents care about social media but as a novelist, I can tell you that my agent and publisher never talk to me about my social media, even when I wished they would. If you are a nonfiction writer, or work for someone who didn’t get the memo that social media by authors doesn’t sell proven quantities of books, then I don’t know what to tell you except to say that platform and social media are not synonymous.)
I’m not telling you that I won’t go back to social media.
I’m not promising I won’t use social media occasionally and strategically when I feel I must, to promote my own classes, books, podcasts, or crowdfunding efforts. Even aside from all that, I still have to make occasional posts for one of my freelance literary jobs.
If I were a stronger person, I wouldn’t go back at all. But I’m stuck in the capitalist system, too. Also, as a person who writes about other people, I don’t feel like I can exit contemporary culture entirely, or my characters will be bizarre and unconvincing. If average folks are struggling with social media, AI, and other horsemen of the apocalypse, I need to know those horsemen.
But if I do use social media regularly again, I hope I’ll remember. Posting is not a proven way to sell books. There is no proven way to sell books, except to write many books and hope that one is beloved by readers enough that they keep talking about it and buying extra copies, not because they are your friends, but because they truly love your stories.
And also, if you’ll forgive me one last point: maybe it’s okay not to sell a bajillion books.
You heard it from me, and maybe from Colleen Hoover, too.
For a longer version of this post with more specifics about how social media has changed and why it has lost utility for authors, please subscribe to Andromeda’s author Substack for free. Andromeda Romano-Lax is a book coach and the author of six novels who can be found on Substack, a platform that still seems to yield benefits to authors with fewer negative side effects.