Hello again,
Forgive me a few minutes of self-indulgence with this one.
I know several of you probably don’t use Twitter, or at least not regularly. Talking about it has always been an exercise in navel-gazing for those of us who are well and truly addicted to the bird-app, the hellsite, whatever you want to call it.
But I wanted to talk about its role for writers who are trying to get our work out there, and what we would do without it.
For what it’s worth, despite today’s news, I don’t actually think this is the end of Twitter. It might be the end of Twitter as we know it, and I don’t know if what comes next will be better, worse, or about the same.
However, I think now is a good moment to pause and ask: Why are writers even on Twitter in the first place? If it were to disappear, what should we do? And if it stays, should we leave anyway?
Writers on Twitter
There is a lot to be said for why writers just shouldn’t be on Twitter in the first place.
It is, first and foremost, a distraction. When I’m stuck writing a tricky sentence, my hands seem to move without my willing them to, and open up the Twitter feed. Here I lose 10 minutes, then remember what I was doing, go back to the document, and the process begins again.
Then there’s the issue of professional jealousy. What would be a difficult thing to deal with at a normal scale becomes unmanageably large through Twitter.
If you’re given to envy at all, then you end up feeling sour about writers you’ve never heard of winning plaudits you didn’t know existed. A small taste of this can be good for motivation, but a lot of it just saps the writer’s energy, the timeline turning into a treadmill that they are always failing to keep up with.
And if you manage to stay focused long enough to achieve some success with your writing, then you face a new problem. The site becomes a constant, rolling comments section. People who’ve read your work expect something insightful. It’s this pressure that led Sally Rooney to delete her account.
Well, you may say, if Sally Rooney doesn’t need Twitter then what are the rest of us doing? Let’s go.
But this was after Rooney had already been published, and begun to garner acclaim. The rest of us, if we are not lucky enough to be heralded as a generational voice in our early 20s, need to think about how we hope to achieve even a fraction of Sally’s success.
And that’s why Twitter remains important for the striving writer. Because it gives us a place to both promote our work, and to find new opportunities.
Promotion
Anyone who has worked in online publishing will be able to tell you that, despite what Twitter’s new owner may think, the site is negligible in terms of how much traffic it generates.
That means it is not the best place to get people to actually read your writing, though if you get lucky they might at least retweet it.
And as author Leigh Stein wrote in her newsletter this month, it isn’t a particularly good tool for selling your own books, either.
But what Twitter is useful for is promoting yourself. For the shy, the self-deprecating, the actually or spiritually British among you, this may be a horrifying prospect.
But I don’t mean you have to be someone who constantly posts about your own achievements on Twitter (that’s what LinkedIn is for). I think of a Twitter profile as more of a landing page.
If I read a short story I like, I often go immediately afterwards to Twitter to find the writer and follow them so that I’ll see when they next publish something. Or it might work the other way round, with someone’s funny or interesting tweet directing me to their profile, where I can find their work in a longer form.
Many small publishers have also been voicing their concern in recent weeks, because the communities of readers who coalesce on Twitter are still very valuable. Independent press 404 Ink said that the site actually generates 30-40% of their online sales.
Yes, maybe Twitter overall doesn’t shift as many books as TikTok or Instagram do, because Twitter is a niche platform. But that means that if you are operating in a niche, perhaps by being an indie publisher or part of a genre community such as horror, you can reach the exact people you need to find.
Twitter might not be the only place you can promote yourself as a writer, but it is an important part of the patchwork. And importantly, it’s the one that comes most naturally to many of us, being text-based.
Opportunities
There are many ways to find publication opportunities, prizes, and other support for your writing online that don’t involve Twitter, or even any form of social media. You can browse Submittable, seek out blog posts, and subscribe to newsletters like this one.
But Twitter remains a useful way to seek these things out, or even just to stumble upon them. It is also integral to the creation of collated newsletters like this one.
Twitter is where I find the good stuff, from tiny new magazines to massive one-off opportunities, that I wouldn’t see if I just stuck to checking the submission windows of the same magazines and contests.
Again, there is a potential productivity trade-off here. Seeing all the wonderful things going on can make me tempted to switch focus every three seconds. But overall, I find it a useful incentive.
There’s also the chance that an opportunity might find you. In her newsletter, Stein mentions how she uses Twitter to test out ideas, and has even been commissioned to write articles off the back of tweets. I myself have had job approaches in my Twitter DMs before.
Maybe this is truer for journalism than for creative writing, but it’s hard to deny that there is huge value in the fact that Twitter is home to so many editors, producers, agents, and others responsible for overseeing the production of - for lack of a better word - content. It has levelled the playing field for a lot of people entering the industry.
Literary citizenship and Twitter
Before all this kicked off, I was thinking a lot about literary citizenship, and what it means today.
In part this was prompted by the drama over at Hobart Magazine, which I won’t get into, and this piece by Meghan Daum which used the debacle as a launchpoint for a wider discussion of the literary world.
In her view, literary citizenship “implies adherence to an unspoken moral code, one that pays lip service to equity and inclusion while still making gossip and exclusivity the main event”. In other words, it’s a kind of clique, open only to the MFA crowd.
I thought this was probably a reasonable critique of a select group of writers, but wasn’t sure it describes literary citizenship as a whole.
The way I have understood the term is simply that you can’t expect people to be interested in reading your work if you’re not reading any of theirs. Taking part in the writing community could mean supporting literary magazines, attending events, joining a writing group, or just posting about work you enjoyed on social media.
There is a dark side to this expectation, which is that it forces writers to prop up an industry in which they already get a tiny part of the pie. Becky Tuch of the excellent Lit Mag News Roundup has previously written about this for Salon.
She asks: Who makes up for the declining space for book reviews in newspapers? Is it the owners of media conglomerates, or publishing CEOs? No.
“It is writers, working mostly without pay, reviewing books, interviewing fellow writers, and tweeting and posting messages about books they love and authors they admire on social media.”
The thing about how Twitter fits into all of this is I think it’s a reflection of all these different interpretations of literary citizenship.
There’s the positive side, which reinforces community and helps connect writers with readers. Twitter has variously prompted me to sign up for other writers’ newsletters, buy books, read and share short stories, and book tickets to events.
There’s also the cliquey-ness, which fits well with Twitter’s tendency to pour lighter fluid on whatever controversy is kicking off on a given day.
And there’s the slight tension of putting in a lot of effort, promoting both your own and others’ work, and not getting that much back from it, all while wondering where exactly the profits are going.
This exhaustion, though, is one reason why so many people are balking at the idea of starting from scratch on another platform. Twitter can be unrewarding, but at least we know how to use it.
Overall, I think Twitter is a useful tool for literary citizenship, especially the kind that costs you time rather than money: sharing other people’s work. But it can also make writers feel like we’re scrabbling over each other, like crabs in a bucket.
What next?
In recent years, many of my IRL friends have drifted away from Twitter, at about the same rate as some of them have stopped drinking. For some it’s a natural boredom with the site as they migrate to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, but for others it’s a conscious mental health decision.
I completely understand why anyone would choose to cut themselves off from the daily chaos that Twitter thrives on, and the self-doubt it can engender.
It is also undoubtedly a time-suck, and like a lot of places on the internet, it favours those who already have established audiences.
But look: I’ve been a scrabbling little crab in this particular bucket for 11 years now. If this thing is staying online, then I am staying on it.
Twitter continues to be the place I find the most interesting work, the place I can interact with people I admire on a relatively equal footing, and the place I discover the most useful opportunities and ideas for how to progress my writing career. Without it, I just don’t see which alternative can offer as many of the same things.
So at this point, where I should probably redirect you to whatever supposed replacement platform people are moving to, I can only say that, like Dido, I will go down with this ship. Follow me on Twitter.
As ever, if you read this far down, I greatly appreciate it. Here are a few bonus opportunities as a little thank you.
The Stinging Fly is open until the end of the month and having a free online information session about submitting next Tuesday.
And next Wednesday there’s an online panel event with The Hot House, a development lab for TV and film projects about climate change from BBC Writersroom.
Science fiction and fantasy magazine Apex is closing for December so if you were thinking of sending something to them, get it in now.
Last call for the New Writers Flash Fiction Competition, which is £6 to enter and closes 30 November.
If you have published a travel writing book this year, you can submit it for consideration to the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. It’s free to enter and you only have to send in a copy if it’s not widely available. Self-published books are eligible.