Why do literary agents continue to ask our Twitter follower counts in Query Manager when Twitter is no longer called Twitter but X and the correlation between a high social media following and book sales has been widely disproven? Why is this a bar that we have to clear when it doesn’t actually mean anything and in fact never did?
Okay maybe that’s a stretch. There are plenty of people who owe their career to spouting off on Twitter, twitter pitch contests and the like.
Author marketing expert Tim Grahl helps author clients market their books. In a blog post breaking down the myths of social media marketing for authors he shared some of the data from his campaigns.
Consider:
* One client with 160,000+ Twitter followers got less than 400 sales running the book on Twitter. That’s a conversion rate of 0.25%. “In multiple tests across many social media accounts, it’s a normal thing to get well under 1% – more like 0.25%,” Tim writes.
* Another writer friend had someone with 1 million+ Twitter followers promote their book, with no noticeable bump in book sales.
If social media followings matter then surely musician Billie Eilish, with over 100 million followers on Instagram and Twitter, could move copies of her book with posts. And while Eilish’s book sold some 64,000 copies at the time the of this NYT article on the limits of social media marketing for authors , the million-plus advance she got for said book shows her publisher is expected a better performance for the title.
We gave Twitter too much power, now that it’s gone we get our power back

The kind of Twitter at least in my corner of literary world led authors to a mass exodus to Instagram and frantic attempts to replicate their reach.
Those most panicked about remaining relevant were those who had built their entire platform on Twitter, and thus the most vulnerable to its antisemetic, anti-trans, pro-Nazi metamorphosis.
If you take nothing else from this, do not build your platform on a house you do not own.
Do I wish that Twitter followers mattered?
I do because I have a few thousand of them, and because aspiring authors or conditions to see any little bit of credibility something worth going to just in case it impresses a gatekeeper.
But they never mattered in the way that we were led to believe. Not when it came to selling books, making money, and funding the time needed to create our art.
I’m still on Twitter. But increasingly it functions like Facebook, as an archive for a person I was at one point in time, a more impressionable version of myself that felt the pressure to post, just in case it mattered.
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