I think about this a lot recently, seeing that TikTok doesn’t seem likely to be going anywhere any time soon unlike Vine. Do you think it’s worth it for a writer who writes for the YA audience to have a TikTok account to promote their stories?
Idk if I will ever do TikTok because I don’t like putting in time to make videos, but I’ve said a similar thing about Instagram before, so who knows? (But me making videos and editing them? Editing videos is such a pain to me, so I really don’t think I’ll be doing it. I don’t find it fun. But who knows?)
I might do it if I can hire someone who enjoys editing videos.
Thoughts?
Update: I created a TikTok account to indulge. Even find that to be too much, but I noticed something very interesting. Once I commented on a TikTok, I get that person’s content on my For You page. Immediate. So, I commented on a bunch of people’s stuff that I enjoyed and erased most of the random junk TikTok was throwing at me. The algorithm worked so fast.
The majority of people I know on there do write adult fiction, but there are plenty of YA writers (myself included lol) lingering around. Some of them are Wattpaders, such as catrinaburgessauthor, others are big-named authors such as Victoria Aveyard, and there are a large number of self-published authors as well.
Editing videos are really hard, a reason why I stopped doing YouTube (though if I ever get in the position to try it again, I would). But with TikTok, there’s not a lot of editing unless you’re doing something fancy or crazy. Some BookTokers will do cosplays and a skit, like courtofkayla. There are writers who do “write with me” videos or a “day in my life.” These all kind of require some form of editing. But a lot of people will do the whole “sit down and talk with me” videos (which is pretty much what I do) where we talk about a specific topic regarding reading, writing, or something happening within these worlds (like plagiarism, writing serious topics like sexual assault, buying books and then returning them after reading it so you can use the money to buy another book, etc.) Otherwise, there’s cute little skits you can do with using a popular sound or creating one with just music in the background.
This is what I do if you wanna get an idea of it? And honestly, I don’t do a lot of editing either. The majority of “editing” I do is working on the captions because they’re not grammatically correct and don’t always get the word that I said.
That’s one of the places where I’m hesitating to use TikTok, I guess. Something which is so active all the time, I’m afraid of it eating phone battery and heating up the phone
How long did it take for your For You page to cater to you? Is it only about what you liked or spent time watching?
Ah, nah. It’ll be fine. When I worked my night shift job, I was on there a lot (say 2-3 hours) if I procrastinated on reading and it was fine. Haha
The way the algorithm seems to work is that whichever videos you’ll like, favorite, and or comment on will have others similar to it and or by the same person appear more frequently to your FYP. So like, for me recently, I’ve been liking a lot of videos surrounding music and dancing and those are the videos I’ll see the most until I start liking videos from other topics and then I’ll see a mixture of them, etc. It starts up pretty quick once you start interacting. Another thing is that the people you follow, you’ll see on your FYP more. You may not see every video of theirs, of course, but you’ll start recognizing the fact that you do follow them and hence, you see their videos and videos like theirs.
This is also why you may want to be careful with what you interact with if you don’t want to see a particular set of videos because if you comment on a single video, you’ll most likely start seeing videos similar to that and then you’ll be a part of that side of TikTok until it slowly dissipates once you start ignoring them. Like, for example, I would occasionally come across videos about religion and stuff that covered serious topics that some commenters would argue about and I would comment with my own arguments (thanks to my hot-headedness) and then I started seeing videos like it which made me annoyed haha. And now every time I see a video about religion, I just scroll on by and I don’t get them that much anymore.
Basically, if you are writing for teens, TikTok is a must, but the content that is there… it’s impossible to compete with. Not to mention, making videos is hard. If you are not natural, it’s a time sink, and nothing more
Like, I wish I could turn my chats about Watty prep into TikTok videos, but… they are probably too long for their clip length, I don’t want to read t(E text so people hear my voice and even more so I don’t want my face anywhere near it. And it’s paltry 12 posts. They will disappear in TikTok like a lead ballon in an ocean.
I dunno what bookstagram is, but I try to be proactive and post the same posts I do on WP on Instagram, but i find it so awkward, because of the interface. I dunno how people do it for fun. It’s such a boring, painstaking work.
i think you can already tell from this thread but some people like tiktok and some people really don’t. Whether its worth it depends on how much you enjoy it and/or how close your finger is to the pulse of your target audience.
i like it because i like tiktok, i don’t even use it for marketting but it has generated some interest in my projects. but it can be very time-consuming and draining. Like any social media it’s best if you don’t take it too seriously and, y’know, meme it up.
I think it’s the necessity to speak and the very short length. Like, I can’t imagine reading out the text like that. I dunno. I don’t have it installed or anything. I want the exposure, but I can barely remember to post on Instagram every few days, and sometimes go for months not posting it.
you don’t have to speak at all, like ever. i’ve had my booktok for 2 years and have never said a word and never shown my face.
Even if you want to add a specific text you can use text-to-speech to read out the text.
and the time thing is understandable but tbh i make posts months apart sometimes and still get way more traffic than anything on my bookstagram ever did.
