How Not to Build an Author Platform in 2025

TL;DR: Twitter doesn’t sell books anymore. Period. Stop wasting time there. Build a boring old email list instead, just like the old-timers told you to.

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Update (10/23/25): A lot of my numbers were based on shaky data and incomplete metrics. Subsequent to posting this I’ve done additional in-depth research. Deep research. Balls deep, as they say.

Save yourself some time, skip the article, and just read this post.

Authors on X don’t want to hear this, but the reality is your follower count is just a vanity metric, not a platform of engaged readers. Certainly not a solid base of potential customers.

That’s not me calling my own grapes sour either—multiple studies, industry surveys, and…

— Ryan Williamson (@rywilwrite) October 23, 2025

The heavy PDF landed in a cloud of dust in my inbox with 47 dazzling pages of charts, posting schedules, and optimized hashtag combinations. The consultant had analyzed my account—nearly 4,200 followers, 200,000+ impressions in the last 14 days, posting 10 times daily—minimum, not counting replies—and diagnosed the problem with surgical precision.

“You’re diluting your reach,” the strategy began. Then came the prescription: reduce to 3-5 posts daily, plus no more than a handful of replies, preferably to high-visibility threads instead of fans, focus on visual content (60% short video, 30% graphics, 10% polls), post at 8 AM, 12 PM, and 6 PM Eastern, use these specific hashtags. The document included view targets (300-500 per post), repost ratio goals (1300% within 30 days!), and a 30-day implementation plan.

Phew! Someone had finally done the work. Someone who understood algorithms, optimization, and all that science shit. Someone who knows the game I demonstrably suck at playing.

What I forgot to ask? Um, how many copies of my upcoming novel will this strategy sell?

I should have asked that before forking over her fee. 

Because I’m self-publishing Doors to the Stars in four months, and I’m starting from scratch in ways that are… frankly terrifying.

Let me explain my situation, because I bet you $20 it’s more dire than yours.

I’m a multi-genre author. My brand isn’t epic fantasy or military sci-fi or YA space opera—it’s literary genre fiction with a specific voice and style. I write across genres deliberately. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Here’s what I thought would happen when I built my Twitter presence: Build an engaged audience around my personality, interests, and writing, and they’d be interested in my work in turn.

Bwahahaha. Yeah, I know. I’m an idiot.

So, right, I built an audience of 4,200 people who follow me for… honestly I still don’t know what. Not my unpopular takes on politics. My dry sarcasm and rapier wit? That one viral tweet about Gerson Boom? Legs that go all the way up? Cat-gremlins in bikinis?

Who the hell knows.

But here’s what the overwhelming majority demonstrably don’t follow me for: my writing. Not military sci-fi. Not space opera. Not anything I write.

I only really figured this out when I lost access to my publisher’s email list and suddenly needed to launch a book on my own, with the platform I’d built.

Jinx! Turns out I don’t have one.

I had a publisher with 14,000+ email subscribers. They published my military sci-fi/fantasy series, which sold thousands of copies and generated over 6 million page reads on Kindle Unlimited in the first year. I wrote a teaser story that’s still generating sign-ups—but they get those email addresses, not me. I have around 800 followers on Amazon who are completely inaccessible except for an automated notification when my next book releases.

This matters because my publisher and I recently parted ways due to audience misalignment.

So despite years of traditionally successful metrics, I’m rebuilding from essentially zero. My neglected email list has about 150 subscribers. Other than that I apparently have no direct reader access. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

“At least it can’t get worse!” you say.

Heh. Hold on to your butts and get this: Whatever audience I do have access to is the wrong bloody audience.

I built 4,200 Twitter followers around—well I’m not sure what exactly. Military-themed sci-fi/fantasy I hoped. But that’s highly debatable because I post all sorts of crazy shit. So who knows! Anyway, my new release is dark, gritty YA space opera targeted primarily at young women. Looking at my new followers over the last three months: 17.5% are female and 10% are teens. I have no direct data on the overlap between female and teen followers, nor whether the new followers’ demographics reflect my entire follower base, but factoring in teen gender demographics on Twitter I can spitball maybe 200 of my followers are the core target demographic for this book.

Also I’ve landed in some sort of algorithmic hell somehow and my “reach” is 2-3% of my followers—roughly 80-120 people see each post. That alone is craptastic. But worse, oh so much worse, my repost rate is 0.098% (that’s not just “low,” or “pretty bad” or “bogus” or “dude, your posts are super under-shared”—it’s catastrophically awful).

On the plus-side, I have 10-15 loyal fans who regularly engage with my writing content meaningfully. I love them to death. We’re pals. Yes, they’re real and they’re fabulous.

And here’s the thing about those engaged readers: they engage with everything I post about my writing. Military sci-fi posts. YA space opera posts. Historical second-world fantasy, Weird West. Worldbuilding threads. Sample chapters. Raw writing excerpts. Doesn’t matter what genre.

They’re my readers.

The other 4,185 people? According to the metrics they don’t engage with anything about my books. Ever. Regardless of genre. They’re not “military sci-fi fans who don’t want YA.” They’re people who apparently followed me for reasons completely unrelated to the fact that I write novels.

But sadly my engaged readers aren’t enough to launch a book in a completely different subgenre than my last series. Or just launch a book, period.

Or fund a Kickstarter (so stop suggesting I should).

I didn’t hire the consultant just to “increase impressions.” I specifically asked: how do I reach outside my follower bubble and attract the right readers—young women interested in dark, gritty YA space opera—before my launch in four months?

The consultant’s answer was that 47-page tome about optimized posting times and hashtags.

But my spidey sense was tingling.

Because consultants, right?

IYKYK.

So I did some independent research to validate her strategy. Now, hold onto your Ranger Panties because what I found will shock them right off—especially if you’re facing the same problem: launching to the wrong audience or worse, no audience at all.

Important caveat: I’m writing this article for indie sci-fi and fantasy authors specifically, and honestly this probably isn’t news to savvy indie authors who’ve been building lists and platforms for years. But I had a publisher with a platform. Now I don’t. If you’re also transitioning—coming from traditional or hybrid publishing, losing access to your readers, pivoting genres, starting over, or just starting out—this is for you.

But mostly it’s for me.

The Professional Recommendation

1. Stop posting like a meth-addled squirrel with terminal ADHD (before you say, “that’s totally ableist, Ryan,” I can make that joke because I have ADHD, like really bad). 
2. Limit to 3-5 posts daily to avoid spam filters. 
3. Stop replying to every single @ mention. 
4. Content mix of 60% short videos, 30% graphics, 10% polls. 
5. Post at 8 AM, 12 PM, and 6 PM Eastern. 
6. Use 2-3 hashtags per post—#YASciFi, #SciFiBooks, #IndieAuthor. 

Result: Achieve banger-level views per post and dope repost ratios within 30 days.

The recommendations addressed real problems. I do post WAY too much—that’s painfully obvious. My engagement rate dropped 24% recently. The strategy felt data-driven, specific, actionable.

Can haz science, amirite?

Before anyone asks: no, I’m not revealing who the consultant is. We’ll just call her “Bob.” This isn’t about one consultant’s overpriced advice. It’s about an entire industry built on metrics that don’t correlate with the thing authors actually need.

So I asked myself: Hey self, if I execute this perfectly, how many books will I sell?

In other words, show me the money.

The math works out thusly: 3-5 posts a day averaging 400 impressions per post is around 50,000 impressions per month, give or take. But that’s not fifty thousand eyeballs in my new book’s target demographic. Maybe they’re just fans of Doomsday Recon. Maybe they just like elves in bikinis or legs that go all the way up. Maybe they followed me for that one Gerson Boom tweet and promptly forgot about me. Maybe they’re making popcorn and watching me argue about unconstitutional executive overreach or why using generative AI for art doesn’t make you literally Vincenzo Peruggia.

The consultant assumed my problem was “wrong audience for this specific book”—that I needed to find YA readers instead of military sci-fi readers.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is my Twitter audience demonstrably doesn’t read anything I write, regardless of genre.

Sure, when I post about Doomsday Recon (military sci-fi), I get more engagement than when I post about Doors to the Stars (YA space opera), but not a lot more. Not enough to indicate the majority of my “author platform” cares or frankly is even aware I’m an author. (Which is weird because I post about my writing, like, a lot, and it even says I’m an author in my bio and pinned tweet.)

Anyway, I’m not trying to convert military sci-fi fans into YA readers. I’m trying to find readers. Period.

Back to eyeballs. What I need to know is how many of those eyeballs are in fact my target demographic for Doors to the Stars?

Because, strategic planning.

So let’s try and figure it out together, rough ballpark, because I’m not the best at math and neither is Grok. 

Sharpens pencil.

Looking at my new followers over the last three months: 17.5% are female and 10% are teens. I have no direct data on the overlap between female and teen followers, nor whether the new followers’ demographics reflect my entire follower base, but factoring in teen gender demographics on Twitter I can spitball maybe 200 of my almost 4,200 followers are the core target demographic for this awesome book that I know you’ll love.

I’m going to apply this fancy hypergeometric model approximating random selection I’ve scratched on the back of a napkin here (we could also use a binomial distribution, but the hypergeometric is more precise for finite populations). My posts currently reach 2-3% of my total followers on average. But with Bob’s recommendations, I can boost that to a solid 10%. So yay! Now, given the key parameters and probability math function, adjusting for expected value and variance and standard deviation, Mars being retrograde in Uranus, etc., we arrive at a bell-shaped distribution. Centered around the mean, the number of females 13-18 years of age seeing a given post roughly works out to between 10 and 30 (within ±2 standard deviations), with a mode of 19.

Nineteen potential high value customers per post. Not too shabby. (Unless they don’t read dark and gritty YA space opera, which would be a problem.)

Of course the audience for the book is broader than that, given its likely appeal to older and non-female readers. So if you factor in non-Romance YA SF readership among boys and adults of all various and sundry genders, each book-related post could reach as many as, I don’t know, let’s say 40 additional potential readers? Works for me. (I actually did the research and calculated based on reading preferences and blah, blah, blah, and yeah, it’s about 40.)

So we’ll say 60 eyeballs per post that might be interested in buying said book. That’s… 7,200 eyeballs a month!

Scribbles on the back of an envelope because the napkin is full.

Frowns.

Well, shit. Even hitting Bob’s targets perfectly—roughly 400 views per post, 3-5 posts daily, sustained for 30 days—the math works out to an absolute best case of 5 copies sold per month.

Seventeen bucks and change in royalties if the indie gods are smiling down on me that month. $210 a year if I’m really effing lucky. That’s… not awesome. Suboptimal. Cannot recommend. Highly.

“Wait!” you cry. “Less than sixty copies sold a year? What the hell is this happy horseshit?”

Indeed.

The horseshit, dear reader, is that the current reported conversion rate for book sales on The Platform Formally Known as Twitter in this the Year of Our Lord 2025 is… a whopping 0.07% (I’ve seen even worse estimates actually, far worse).

That’s like… your odds of contracting primary biliary cholangitis or the annual probability of a tornado striking a specific square kilometer in Kansas. Or like scoring a hole-in-one in that game where you hit a tiny white ball with clubs across impeccably manicured lawns infested with psychopathic gophers.

But how? Why? What happened?

Platform-wide engagement on X/Twitter collapsing 48% from 2024 to 2025 is what happened. The median engagement rate fell from 0.029% to 0.015%. Worse, an author named Derek Haines tracked 4,435 impressions that generated 43 engagements, which led to 3 Amazon clicks, which resulted in zero sales. His conclusion after monitoring 17,000 profile visits over 28 days: “Never saw correlated jumps in book sales from increased tweeting.”

So all my math was essentially optimistic bullshit and a colossal waste of time, because according to Derek Haines you need approximately 40,000 impressions per organic sale. Which is far worse than 0.07% (and is just his estimate and possibly off by an order of magnitude). The actual number? No one seems to know exactly, and there are a buttload of variables, only that it’s Really Not Great.

Hell, even a super-duper Pollyanna estimate of 1500 impressions per sale ain’t exactly awesomesauce. I figure reality sits somewhere between the two extremes.

Still bullshit though.

Oh, and get this. It turns out only 12% of Real Authors(tm) still use X weekly, according to BookBub’s 2025 survey of 850+ authors. X ranks sixth in platform usage among authors, behind Facebook (62%), Instagram (51%), YouTube (29%), TikTok (27%), and even Bluesky (21%).

Frigging BlueSky has more active professional authors than X. BlueSky.

What the eff-word are we doing on these hellsites?

Bob would argue: “But you’re building audience, creating touchpoints, establishing presence.”

Fair point.

Let’s compare those “touchpoints” to alternatives.

Email marketing converts at 2.6-8%—that’s 37 to 114 times better than Twitter’s 0.07%. Email open rates run 20-30% compared to Twitter’s sub-2% organic reach. ROI: $36-68 per dollar spent versus near-zero for Twitter. Authors making $5,000+ monthly? Every single one has an email list of 5,000-20,000+ engaged subscribers.

Think about that for a minute or five.

There are virtually no success stories of indie sci-fi/fantasy authors achieving significant book sales through X/Twitter in 2024-2025. The most-cited success stories occurred in 2012-2019 before nasty algorithm changes fundamentally altered the platform. Multiple authors report that X changes in 2023-2024 led them to leave due to lower visibility and monetization issues.

Remember: Only 12% of authors still use X weekly.

Bob’s strategy would’ve improved my analytics dashboard immensely. It just won’t have an impact on my income.

UPDATE (10/19/25): I ran a survey on Twitter to skip all the janky metrics analysis voodoo and land some hard numbers.

Let’s break it down, run it up the flagpole, circle back, and see what the landscape looks like from 10,000 feet.

Twitter Audience Analysis: Fan Survey

Methodology

I conducted a survey via tweet asking followers to indicate interest in my writing/book updates by liking the post. The survey post read: “…hands up if you’re following me because you’re here for updates on my writing/next books. Simple quick tap on the like button for ‘yes’ is all I ask.”

Data Collection:

• Survey post received 2,041 total unique impressions
• 52 likes (affirmative responses)
• Impression breakdown: 50.1% followers, 49.9% non-followers
• Total follower base: 4,033 accounts

Sample Parameters:

• Follower impressions: ~1,023 (25.4% of total follower base)
• Response rate from followers who saw post: 5.1% (52/1,023)

Demographic Data (Impressions):

• Gender: 85.8% male, 13.7% female, 0.5% not specified
• Age distribution: 0.5% (13-17), 2.0% (18-24), 14.3% (25-34), 25.2% (35-44), 27.4% (45-54), 15.6% (55-64), 15.0% (65+)

Assumptions

1. Definition of “Fan”: Any follower who did not actively like the post is classified as not interested in writing content. This includes those who saw the post but chose not to engage, because how interested can they really be if they won’t even tap a like button?
2. Representative sample: The ~1,023 followers who received impressions are assumed to be representative of the full 4,030 follower base.
3. Impression validity: Twitter impressions are treated as confirmed views (post appeared on user’s screen, presumably hitting their eyeballs).
4. Engagement as intent: A “like” represents actionable interest; passive interest without engagement is functionally equivalent to disinterest for marketing purposes.

Margin of Error

With a sample size of 1,023 from a population of 4,030:

• Confidence level: 95%
• Margin of error: ±2.7 percentage points
• Engagement rate range: 2.4% to 7.8%

Results

Overall “Fan” Population:

• Observed engagement rate: 5.1%
• Estimated total “fans”: 206 followers (5.1% of 4,030)
• Range (95% confidence): 97-314 followers

Demographic Breakdown of “Fans”:

• Women: 13-43 fans (13-21% of fan base), most likely ~28
• Under 24: 2-8 fans (2-3% of fan base), most likely ~5
• Men 35+: 66-214 fans (~68% of fan base), most likely ~140

Core demographic: Middle-aged to older males (35-64) represent approximately 85% of the writing-interested audience.

Conclusion

Approximately 5.1% of the follower base (roughly 200 followers) demonstrate active interest in writing content. This represents a highly engaged micro-audience within a larger follower base of 4,033. The remaining 95% of followers either follow for other content or are not engaged with the account’s primary purpose as a writing platform.

So it would appear in actuality I have 2-8 young adults interested in my writing. Not promising if I’m branching out into YA space opera.

Plus ~28 classy ladies over 24.

And of course the core demographic of ~140 dudes over 35. Which, given my audience mostly came from Doomsday Recon readers, makes total sense.

Remember, I’m not pivoting to YA—I just happened to write one. I also have a literary-ish space opera series (Dark Dominion) and historical second world fantasy (Stygian Blades) for adults of any one of many genders.

But enough about that.

Back to engaged readers. I’m not complaining about my loyal fans on Twitter at all. I absolutely adore the noble few who consistently engage with my writing content. They matter a great deal to me. But you can’t launch a book to less than twenty actively engaged people, or even 97-314 fairly interested people, and expect sales momentum. You can’t build Amazon algorithm favor. You can’t generate the dozens and dozens of reviews you need for visibility. You can’t create the sales velocity that pushes you into genre bestseller lists.

My noble < 20 highly engaged followers represent a valuable seed audience; just not one large enough to hang a book launch on.

What about Bob? Her promise was reaching “outside my follower bubble to attract new readers.” But even with perfect execution—hundreds and hundreds of views per post, baller reposts, optimized hashtags—I’d still be showing dark YA space opera content about complex female characters to an audience that’s very much overwhelmingly not-teenage-girls-thirsting-for-gritty-sci-fi.

Twitter’s algorithm has sussed out my audience over years and years of careful observation. It knows who wants my content. It’s probably even right. The problem is the vast majority of that audience isn’t going to be forking over $4.99 for a gritty YA space opera about a radiation-poisoned Indonesian junk rat who decides to stick it to the Man and save the galaxy. (They probably won’t be forking over money for my other upcoming books either. Or my existing ones.)

Here’s what I actually need: 1,000-2,000 email subscribers who want dark, gritty YA space opera with complex female characters before my February launch. Not Twitter followers. Not even people who liked my old books (but you’re welcome to join the party!). New readers in a different demographic who will actually buy this book (and the sequels I’m planning if it sells halfway decently).

So when I evaluated Bob’s strategy, I wasn’t asking “will this get me more impressions?” I was asking: “Will this help me find 1,000 readers who actually want what I’m writing when my current audience demonstrably doesn’t?”

The answer is a resounding “Hell no.”

The correct answer, and I hate this, is bloody old fashioned email lists.

Same as is ever was.

I desperately wanted Twitter to work. I like it, warts and all. It gives me lots of nice little dopamine hits, and I need those. I wanted some magic algorithm hack to suddenly connect me with thousands of YA space opera readers who’ve been eagerly waiting for my books, clutching cold hard cash in their sweaty little hands.

But Twitter’s algorithm spent years learning my audience is—middle-aged men who apparently like things not my writing. When those people don’t engage with my posts about complex female characters and dark YA themes, the algorithm interprets that as “this content sucks anus” rather than “this content is for a different audience—let’s find them!”

I can’t retrain the Twitter algorithm in four months. But I can build an email list of the right readers from scratch.

Email converts at 2.6-8% compared to Twitter’s 0.07%. Open rates: 20-30% compared to Twitter’s sub-2% organic reach. ROI: $36-68 per dollar spent. You own it. Algorithm-proof. And you control who’s on it. McKinsey research found email is 40x more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined for customer acquisition.

Not 40% better.

Forty fucking times better, excuse my Anglo Saxon.

UPDATE (10/17/26): I’ve received a lot of push-back from indie authors on X claiming they do in fact sell “most” of their books on that platform. None provided sales data, metrics, nor comparisons to other viable markets, but they were Very Offended at my gentle suggestion that trying to sell books on X is perhaps maybe just possibly a colossal fucking waste of time.

Feelings ain’t facts.

My favorite t-shirt

All I’m going to say to that is the plural of anecdote ain’t data and correlation don’t imply causation.

But hey, it feels like evidence, especially when you’re desperate to believe the time you’ve invested wasn’t wasted. Because sunk cost fallacy.

And to be fair, I know of at least one author who does sell a reasonable number of copies per month using X as his primary marketing platform, so for balance and objectivity in this article, I’ll share my post from today outlining his strategy for you.

SELL 100+ COPIES OF YOUR BOOK PER MONTH ON X WITH THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!

But first let’s talk sales funnels. On X it works like this:

Impressions → Clicks → Sales

There are a ton of variables, but very roughly for 1 book sale you need ~14 visitors to your book page/Amazon…

— Ryan Williamson (@rywilwrite) October 18, 2025

But enough about that. If you’re happy with the book sales you generate on X, bully for you and godspeed.

Here’s what I’m gonna do myself instead:

Weeks 1-3: Create the reader magnet for the right audience

I’m going to write a novella. Not just any novella, mind you. A novella specifically designed to attract young women interested in dark, gritty space opera with complex female protagonists.

Not just to “demonstrate my writing quality.” I already have five published novels that do that. But to “demonstrate I write the specific thing you’re looking for.”

A reader magnet can’t just be “good writing in your world.” It needs to clearly signal the specific subgenre, tone, and themes your new book delivers. If you’re trying to seduce cozy fantasy readers, your reader magnet better be cozy. Not “fantasy that happens to have a cozy scene.” Cozy from page one. Balls-deep cozy.

Week 4: Landing page with demographic-specific copy

BookFunnel or StoryOrigin for delivery. Landing page with copy that speaks directly to my target demographic: “Get this free dark space opera novella about a young woman making impossible choices before the novel launches—and oh, if you’re game to drop a review on launch day, here’s a free eARC of the novel before it launches too!”

Not generic “free sci-fi novella.” Specific language that attracts the readers I need and filters out readers I don’t. Expected conversion: 5-18% of landing page visitors become subscribers. The conversion rate matters less than conversion quality. I’d rather have 500 subscribers who want dark YA space opera than 2,000 subscribers who want whatever and will never buy my new book, or worse leave it bad reviews because it wasn’t cozy enough or the love interest doesn’t have rock-hard abs and a third leg.

Weeks 5-16: Traffic generation (completely bypassing my existing “audience”)

This is where Bob’s strategy falls apart. The entire strategy assumed I should use my existing Twitter audience. But my existing Twitter audience is the wrong audience.

I need to find readers who’ve never heard of me, who aren’t looking for—whatever the hell my Twitter followers are looking for, who want exactly what Doors to the Stars delivers.

But what actually drives the right landing page traffic for those juicy email signups?

One word: Ads.

Amazon Ads with a small budget ($5-10 daily), targeting keywords specific to dark YA space opera and books with complex female protagonists. Negative keywords for romantasy and cozy space sex-jaunts and whatever else is saturating the market.. Reverse-harem LitRPG with trailer park elves. I don’t know. Expected cost per signup: $0.50-2.00. At $10/day for 90 days, that’s $900 for 450-1,800 subscribers if I optimize ruthlessly toward my target demographic. (And by “optimize ruthlessly” I mean “obsessively check the dashboard at 2 AM wondering why teenagers aren’t clicking my ads.”)

BookFunnel Group Promotions for YA sci-fi and space opera specifically. Not general sci-fi. Not military sci-fi. YA space opera where authors with similar books cross-promote reader magnets. Expected results: 0-500 subscribers per promotion. Free except for BookFunnel membership ($100/year). I’m targeting 3-4 promotions over four months.

Newsletter Swaps with other authors writing dark YA space opera or gritty YA sci-fi with female protagonists. Not the Taken by the Tentacle Alien crowd. Not random indie authors. Specific authors whose existing lists already contain my target demographic. Expected results: 300-500 new subscribers per swap with well-matched audiences. I’ll focus on this after I hit 500 subscribers and can offer reciprocal value. (Because “hey, want to swap newsletters?” is a much easier sell when you actually have a newsletter worth swapping.)

Reddit and Facebook Groups with strategic, non-spammy participation in YA sci-fi communities, dark fantasy reader groups, space opera fan spaces. Answering “looking for recommendations” threads with genuine suggestions including my reader magnet where relevant. Time-intensive (2-3 hours weekly) but generates 10-50 highly targeted signups monthly from the right demographic.

Video content on platforms that don’t know I exist. TikTok and Instagram Reels haven’t learned the bad lessons I accidentally taught Twitter. TikTok’s user base is 61% female. Instagram’s is 51.8% female. My target demographic—young women interested in dark, gritty YA space opera—is actually on these platforms, unlike Twitter where only 17.5% of my new followers in the last three months are female (and I know for a fact that’s an improvement over the previous three months).

Before we go any further, I’m just going to come out and say it. I hate TikTok. With a passion. I have a TikTok allergy. I break out in hives. And I hate making videos of myself even more. By an order of magnitude.

But here’s what I’m rather good at: making production-quality AI videos showing scenes from my books, character designs, world-building elements. For sci-fi and fantasy where visual spectacle matters, and when my target demographic is young women who engage heavily with aesthetic content and character-focused storytelling, this can totally work.

Yeah, I’ll drive away anti-AI people, sure, but the research shows they’re a whiny minority and your average reader couldn’t care less.

Back to TikTok. 59 million print book sales were tied to BookTok influencers in 2024. The #BookTok hashtag has 200+ billion views. Forty-eight percent of users discovered new books through the platform last year. Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing” became a #1 bestseller and secured a Netflix deal through BookTok promotion—exactly the kind of dark, character-driven space opera/fantasy with complex female protagonists that appeals to the demographic I need.

I can make production quality 15-30 second videos that create emotional hooks targeted specifically at my demographic in my sleep. Sequences with lone female protagonists making impossible choices. Character confrontations showcasing moral complexity. Dark space aesthetics. Text overlays with hooks that signal exactly what kind of story this is: “The galaxy is just ash and liars.” “She who dares, wins.” “There is no destiny, only choice.”

“Link to free dope-ass novella in bio.”

Time investment: 2-3 hours weekly to create 5-7 videos. Post them to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. Skip Twitter video—my audience hates my videos anyway and apparently text performs better there. Expected results: unpredictable, but a single viral video can generate thousands of landing page visits. Most videos get 100-500 views. True, the algorithm is chaos. But the potential upside—the algorithm finds young women who engage with dark YA content and starts showing them my videos—makes it worth the investment.

Also: Seek out people who have platforms of readers who trust their recommendations and seduce them into giving Doors to the Stars a good word. I don’t know how easy this will be, but I’d be crazy not to try, right?

Four months of all that? If I execute well, I’m targeting 1,500-2,000 subscribers by launch who actually want dark YA space opera. That’s 30-160 launch week sales (at 2-8% conversion with 20-30% open rates) from the right readers. That’s momentum in the right genre category. That’s Amazon algorithm favor showing my book to similar readers. That’s the difference between a successful launch and crash and burn. That’s also assuming a professional cover (already got one), competitive pricing ($2.99 for the first 72 hours then $4.99), and a book that delivers what the reader magnet promises (please, I’m a professional author).

Compare that to Bob’s Twitter strategy: 50,000 impressions to an audience of 4200 mostly unengaged people generating maybe 0-5 sales from readers who probably won’t like the book anyway.

“But what about Twitter?” you ask. 

What about it? One post daily directing people to book-related content on my blog. That’s it. Each post might generate five landing page visits. Maybe 1-2 newsletter subscribers or eARC reviewer signups every couple days. At 0.5 signups per day from the right demographic, that’s 60 over four months—3-4% of my subscriber goal.

Twitter becomes a minor supplementary traffic source, not the strategy. As is good and proper.

UPDATE (10/18/25): On second thought, screw that. I’ll post whatever and whenever I damn well feel like it and just have fun on Twitter. Because dopamine hits and all.

So, basically the conclusion is I might as well keep posting random shit that interests me and forget about metrics and the algorithm because 96% of my followers aren’t here for my writing, but they ARE here for my ADHD brain drippings.

Speaking of, here’s proof extremely short… pic.twitter.com/Olu8bQgO5M

— Ryan Williamson (@rywilwrite) October 19, 2025

Anyway, what really matters is Amazon optimization. Keywords, categories, reviews, read-through rates. This won’t be sexy work—it’s keyword research to understand how readers search for books in my subgenre, category optimization to appear in the right browsing lists, review strategies through my email list. One-time optimization might take 8-12 hours, but better Amazon visibility converts significantly higher than social media awareness because the reader is already shopping.

Plus 800 people are waiting on Amazon for my next book to drop, so there’s that. Hard to quantify.

So, minimal Twitter maintenance. One or two posts daily maximum. No more legs that go all the way up. No more sexy Epasotl. Sorry. Text posts with 1-2 hashtags. Wednesday 9 AM, Tuesday/Thursday 10 AM posting times. Time limit: 15-30 minutes daily. Treat it as water cooler, not a platform. Because it ain’t one.

I have four months to build what successful indie authors build over years, and I need to do it with a completely different demographic than the one I inherited from my previous publisher. I don’t have time to retrain the Twitter algorithm to understand I’ve branched out and written something different now—or that I write at all (because it doesn’t seem to get that either).

What I do have is time to write a reader magnet that clearly signals exactly what my new novel delivers. Build a landing page with copy that attracts the right demographic and filters out the wrong one (I’ve actually already done that with my Advance Reader sign-up page). Drive targeted traffic through carefully selected Amazon Ads keywords, BookFunnel promotions in YA space opera groups, and strategic engagement in communities where my target readers actually exist. Print up some bookmarks and have my daughter hand them out at school, because why the hell not? Create video content on platforms where the algorithm doesn’t know me yet and can discover that I write novels. Launch to 1,500-2,000 subscribers who actually want dark, gritty YA space opera with complex female protagonists.

Will it work?

I won’t know until February.

But I know right now Bob’s Twitter strategy won’t work. Because even if I hit every target perfectly I’d still be launching to an audience that overwhelmingly couldn’t care less about my writing, let alone this book.

Plus 0.07% conversion? That’s just gross. 

For authors in 2025, Twitter is networking at best, not reader acquisition. Email is your owned, algorithm-proof foundation that converts 37-114x better than social media and lets you build the exact audience you need. Video content on platforms that don’t know your old ADHD posting habits creates discovery opportunities with new demographics. Amazon is where readers buy. And a strong launch with even 50-100 engaged subscribers who want what you’re actually selling beats a weak launch to 4,200 Twitter followers who want elves in bikinis and spicy dunks on anti-AI Luddites.

The best marketing advice I got wasn’t from Bob. It came from looking at what successful authors actually do (duh)—and realizing that optimizing the wrong audience is worse than starting from zero.

I’m keeping Twitter of course. Treating it as the author networking and fan engagement platform it actually is. I’m not trying to convert my existing followers anymore. I’m grateful for the loyal fans who’ve stuck with me, and we can still totally hang out.

The rest of my time?

Writing the reader magnet for the right readers. Building the list from scratch with the right demographic. Creating videos on platforms where I can start fresh. Launching to readers who actually want this awesome book (and it really is awesome).

I’ll let you know in February if 1,500 new email subscribers who want dark YA space opera beat 4,200 Twitter followers who want… honestly I still have no bloody clue what most of them want.

What do you want? Answer in the comments below because I’m genuinely curious.

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Appendix: I Didn’t Pull These Numbers Out of My Ass

Platform Performance Data:

Sprout Social. “45+ Twitter (X) stats to know in marketing in 2025.” https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-statistics/

Metricool. “X (Twitter) Engagement Explained.” https://metricool.com/twitter-engagement/

Hootsuite. “Engagement rate benchmarks and formulas: 2025 update.” https://blog.hootsuite.com/calculate-engagement-rate/

Buffer. “How the Twitter (Now X) Algorithm Works in 2025.” https://buffer.com/library/twitter-timeline-algorithm/

Buffer. “Data Shows Best Content Format on Social Platforms in 2025: Millions of Posts Analyzed.” https://buffer.com/resources/data-best-content-format-social-media/

Author-Specific Research:

BookBub Partners. “Social Media for Authors in 2025: Data from 850+ Authors.” https://insights.bookbub.com/social-media-authors-2025-data-850-authors/

Haines, Derek. “Does X (Twitter) Sell Ebooks? It Can Help But Probably Not.” Just Publishing Advice. https://justpublishingadvice.com/does-twitter-sell-ebooks/

McMullen, Chris. “Book Marketing by the Numbers.” https://chrismcmullen.com/2017/11/03/book-marketing-by-the-numbers/

Bad Redhead Media. “Social Media for Authors in 2025 – Helpful or Overrated?” https://badredheadmediallc.substack.com/p/social-media-for-authors-in-2025

Email Marketing Benchmarks:

Kinsta. “20+ Must-Know Email Marketing Statistics.” https://kinsta.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics/

Campaign Monitor. “The Rundown on Email Marketing vs Social Media.” https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/email-marketing-vs-social-media/

Bloomreach. “Email Marketing Conversion Rate Benchmarks.” https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/email-conversion-rate

Build Book Buzz. “3 shocking email marketing statistics all authors should know.” https://buildbookbuzz.com/email-marketing-statistics/

BookTok Impact:

Publishers Weekly. “TikTok Uncertainty Prompts the Book Business to Envision an Even Better Future.” https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96889-tiktok-uncertainty-prompts-the-book-business-to-envision-an-even-better-future.html

Berkeley Economic Review. “BookTok: The Dark Horse of the Economy.” https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/booktok-the-dark-horse-of-the-economy-2/

Reader Magnet & Conversion Data:

Kindlepreneur. “Reader Magnets: The Secret to Attracting More Readers.” https://kindlepreneur.com/reader-magnets/

Brilliantauthor. “33 Reader Magnet Ideas for Authors.” https://brilliantauthor.com/articles/reader-magnet-ideas

General Publishing Industry:

Umstattd, Thomas Jr. “An Indie Creator’s Guide to Marketing Sci-Fi and Fantasy.” https://www.thomasumstattd.com/2024/12/an-indie-creators-guide-to-marketing-sci-fi-and-fantasy/

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A note on methodology:

I cross-referenced claims across multiple sources before including them. Where numbers varied, I used the most conservative figures or noted ranges. I excluded any data I couldn’t verify through at least two independent sources.

The Derek Haines data is self-reported but documented publicly over multiple blog posts with screenshots. The BookBub survey represents 850+ authors and is the most comprehensive recent author platform usage study available.

If you find contradicting data, I want to know. This analysis is only as good as the research behind it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​