Week 11: What is social media for?

It’s week eleven of 2026. How’s the writing going these days? The disorienting shift of daylight savings time is behind us, and I’m gulping down the light, letting the endless sunshine here in San Francisco pour into me. It’s also the Ides of March today, and I’m on high alert for calamities. It’s a stimulating combination, having my energy and awareness both cranked up to 100 percent.

It’s also not sustainable, I know, and I’m navigating towards a slower period in June, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the feeling of stretching myself, seeing just how much I can do.

One thing I’m not doing much of these days is social media, which those of you who follow me anywhere may have noticed—or maybe not since it’s so hard to notice anything these days on the platforms. At the beginning of last year I experimented with posting a lot. My first Novel Study book was still fairly new and I was launching the Novel Study Book Club. I created a formal social media plan and even bought a subscription to a software service to help me manage posts and track performance. I posted multiple times a week across several platforms, creating Instagram carousels, Bluesky threads, and LinkedIn posts from my newsletters and Novel Study posts. And by about this time last year, I had burned out on it. Creating the posts and graphics felt like busywork that took me away from my real work, the work I love to do, which is editing, reading, thinking, and writing.

Most importantly, all of that busywork didn’t seem to make a difference. So I quit. I canceled the expensive software subscription and went right back into quiet mode on my social media channels. Not a single person noticed, as far as I can tell. When I did a postmortem on the experience recently, having Claude analyze a few years of Google Analytics data, my impression was confirmed—all of that social media tap-dancing had driven a grand total of 146 visits to my website out of nearly 39,000—less than half a percent.

I haven't left social media entirely—I still pop up to announce events and appearances, and I genuinely enjoy posting book birthday celebrations (there’s a new one up today, in fact, for the book I’m featuring later in this newsletter). But I now think of the platforms less as a megaphone and more as a storefront window. If someone searches me out, they’ll find me there and get a sense of what I do. But the real stuff happens here, in this newsletter, which is less like glancing in a window and more like being invited inside.

This isn’t the right approach for everyone, but I think it’s definitely the right approach for me and my work. As a reader, a writer, and a human, I enjoy long, focused, deep dives into a single topic rather than brief bulletins about a lot of things. I am good at focusing, good at going deep, so why not just lean into those strengths rather than spend my time creating something I don’t enjoy and don’t really consume myself?

My thinking about this crystallized this past Thursday when I went to a book talk by Amelia Hruby, author of Your Attention Is Sacred Except on Social Media. The book offers a nuanced critique of the attention economy, but Amelia also asks questions designed to unlock our thinking about what these platforms do for us: How does it feel? Is this working for me? Why do I believe it has to be this way? As she said during the Q&A session, “We often have more space to maneuver than we imagine.”

And if you are wondering, well, what do we use instead of social media to help people discover our work, Amelia has answers to that too—the book includes a list of 100 ways to share your work off social media, which you can also access as a free Notion template. As it turns out, the book event I attended, at the charming Black Bird Bookstore, was a way for people to discover Amelia’s work and also a way for attendees to discover the zine Actually People Quarterly created by the evening’s hosts, which I promptly bought after the event.

I am still eyeing a fall publication date and possibly even a Kickstarter campaign for my next Novel Study book, so you’ll get to watch me experimenting in real time with what does and doesn’t work. I’m curious to hear about your own experiments as well—respond to this email to tell me what you are trying, especially if it’s something that’s bringing you joy.

I’m still working my way through my reread of VE Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil in preparation for writing my post analyzing the overall structure, which will focus on the way Schwab manages the sweeping chronology of the novel.

But in the meantime, please check out the full Novel Study archive. You can browse all of the posts or use the tags to zero in on openings, scene studies, or structure posts.

Congrats, Steph! Learn more and buy the book here. Check out my Instagram post to find out my favorite things about the book.

I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page or reply to this email if you are interested in having me speak to your group.

Our Thing of Joy this week is a hilarious short featuring Brennan, Zac, and Josh from the Dropout TV show Make Some Noise, which is a reliable thing of joy in our household. The story of Dropout itself is a thing of joy, if you don't know it: when parent company CollegeHumor was shut down in 2020, CEO Sam Reich bought the company, asked fans to subscribe, and has since built it into an indie streaming service with over a million paid subscribers.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

I’m experimenting with ways to support my writing work—clicking to check out this issue’s advertiser is one way you can support the newsletter. Thank you!

Be the smartest person in the room. 1440 navigates 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive, unbiased news roundup — politics, business, culture, and more — in a quick, 5-minute read. Completely free, completely factual.

Sign up now!