With the news on changes at Twitter, we’re already seeing changes to writing twitter. I’ve seen a number of announcements by people who are leaving. Ironically, that’s the most Twitter response ever — that call to act immediately or you’re #NotDoingYourPart.

I’m not leaving Twitter today. And it’s not because I don’t think what is happening is bad. It almost assuredly is. I’m not leaving because it’s not something I need to do immediately. Whatever changes are going to happen, they’re not going to happen today.

Are changes coming? Probably. Is this going to re-platform bad people? Probably. Is this bad for the world in general? Also probably. And when those things happen, I’ll definitely react. For now? Me leaving Twitter today changes nothing. It won’t affect the sale, it won’t change the stock price (the offer is the offer), it won’t “send a message.”

For now, I’m just getting ready to react. The well prepared among us have probably been doing that for a while now. Nobody ever called me well prepared. I do believe you’re going to see an exodus of writers in some form or fashion. What will it look like? I don’t know. It could be a lot of accounts going to announcements only. Some people will leave completely. Some will stay on, maybe, and try to make the best of a bad situation. But there will be change.

I thought I’d take a look at a few ways that changes might affect the writing/publishing community. I’m going to mostly stick to adult fiction, as I don’t really know the YA and MG scenes that well, and you’re better off listening to someone else on that.

And it made sense to not do this on my own site, rather than in a Twitter thread 🙂

1. Sales. Honestly, Twitter doesn’t directly sell a ton of books for mid-list authors. In fact, any tweet I make trying to get people to buy something is invariably my least-interacted-with tweet of the week.

On the other side of that, tweets where I talk about other people’s books do better than tweets where I try to promote my own. My takeaway from this is that there’s some indirect value that we’re going to lose. The ability to create buzz. For example, does the idea of the Sapphic trifecta take off without Twitter? Maybe. They’re all great books. But I do think that concept worked as sort of a ‘if you liked this one, you should read these other ones,’ and I think it probably positively impacted the sales of all three. Can that move to another platform? Maybe.

But I think that’s where the major change will happen. If writers are on Twitter less, I think it probably affects discoverability, especially among midlist titles. Who knows, maybe this will be the push on publishers to stop trying to rely on free advertising and start spending money to advertise…ok, sorry, I couldn’t even get that out with a straight face. It won’t be.

For me, Twitter has always been a way to find books that I might not have known about and look into them more. I’m not sure where that goes.

2. Community. To me, this is the biggest loss. Writer Twitter is where I’ve met the vast majority of my writing friends, co-conspirators, and acquaintances. I can pretty safely say that without Twitter, I wouldn’t be where I am today as a writer. I doubt I’d even be published. Not because Twitter directly helped me, but because it connected me to people who did.

And I don’t know where that goes or how it works after this. Writers will still gather and talk among themselves. But finding them probably got harder in the short term, and it wasn’t easy to begin with.

Was all the writing advice on Twitter good? It was not. But some was. Will some people still provide it? Almost assuredly, and it will be of the same hit and miss quality that it has always been. But where do you find the people if a lot of the people have left? To me, this is the big question.

3. The Readers. So what do you do if you’re a reader and your favorite authors have left Twitter? Honestly, this just sucks. I think a lot of readers like the glimpse (albeit curated) that they get at the more personal side of creators whose work they enjoy.

So what do you do?

First, you follow them elsewhere, wherever they go. For example, if you’ve liked what I have to say about publishing and writing, today would be a great day to subscribe to my blog so that you get notifications when I publish the next one.

Some authors will likely go more heavily to Instagram. But it’s not a format that fits everyone, so others probably won’t. What I think that means is that as a consumer, you may have to be more intentional about supporting the people you want to support by going where they go.

4. Agents and Twitter Pitching. I’ll address these as part of the same topic, but also hit them separately.

I think Twitter Pitching contests, with a couple of exceptions (DVPit, for example) were already on their way out. As a co-host for #SFFPit, I’ve seen them become less and less productive for both agents and authors, and while they are still a lot of fun and participation (at least for #SFFPit) is as strong as ever among writers, it’s more like we’re losing a form of entertainment than a productive business practice.

Agents…I don’t know. Agents probably go where writers are. A lot of agents are also writers, but even when they aren’t, they have a lot of the same values and interests. Overall, I think agents will be mostly unaffected. There are a few agents who have probably used their Twitter presence to drive some success, but I think the vast majority of them still rely on traditional querying, and I don’t think a lot of their discoverability is tied up in Twitter the way it is with authors.

5. The contacts. This is the worst part for me personally, if I decide to leave Twitter. My whole life, I’ve been horrible at keeping in touch with people. Twitter has changed that for me in the writing community. I can see what other people are doing and talking about, and I can reach out by DM to talk to people I probably wouldn’t talk to any other way. I can’t tell you how many writers I’ve reached out to or who have reached out to me via that platform, and the good that’s come from that on so many levels. I don’t really know what I’m going to do if that’s not there anymore.

In conclusion, there’s a chance I’m overreacting. That we all are. It’s Twitter. It’s not like we don’t ever overreact. There’s going to be change, but change is constant in our lives anyway. And we’ll see where this takes us. But yeah, I’m getting ready.

Tags: Book Twitter, Writing Twitter