Inside Book Twitter's Final(?) Days
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Elon Musk officially took the reins at Twitter HQ on October 28, 2022, following what can only be described as several months of bizarre business shenanigans that left the billionaire CEO of Tesla in control of the tenth largest social media platform. The months since have been chaotic both within the company and on the platform, where thousands of users have jumped ship, fleeing for new alternatives like Mastodon, Post, and Hive.
The recent chaos at Twitter has left many communities on the platform wondering—what happens if we wake up tomorrow and the lights are off for good? One such community is “Book Twitter,” made up of writers, editors, agents, booksellers, publishers, literary organizations, and everyone in between. Recently, notable authors like John Green and Sarah MacLean have joined other prominent voices in either deleting or indefinitely locking their accounts, leaving many fearful that a slow bleed of influential players will eventually lead to the community’s demise—if Twitter’s code doesn’t blow up first.
The thought of Book Twitter going up in a puff of smoke because of one entitled man is upsetting to many people, myself included. In the words of author and writing coach Paulette Perhach, “It feels like the castle we made is being swept off the table by a billionaire's tantrum.” To get to the heart of what’s at stake, let’s look at the role Book Twitter plays in shaping the publishing process.
For many authors, Twitter serves as a 24/7 virtual writing group. A simple search for #WritingCommunity or #amwriting will bring up millions of tweets from hopeful and published authors alike, including writing tips, progress updates, words of encouragement, shared frustrations, and big wins. For every fifty writers who attend the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop each year, there are tens of thousands of people at home cranking out chapters in between a full day at the office and getting their children ready for bed. Twitter provides even these greenest of writers with a supportive community to guide them through the process, whether it results in bestseller stardom or an unfinished manuscript gathering dust on a shelf.
USA Today bestselling writer Meredith Jaeger joined Twitter in 2011 specifically to connect with other authors during the solitary process of working on her novel. She said, “For authors like myself without a huge following, the potential downfall of Twitter won't affect sales as much as it will erase connections and relationships with other writers. The friendships I made on Twitter while querying are the only reason I'm published today. It can be a soul-crushing process, but we encouraged each other not to give up.”
Even now that she’s become an author with three novels published under The Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette), Jaeger still gets something from Book Twitter that she hasn’t been able to find elsewhere. She said, “I've made many author friends on Twitter. Some, like me, have small children at home and understand the chaotic stress of parenting while trying to meet a deadline. We email each other. We host Zoom book launches together. We talk about our professional and personal lives. Though I've never met some of these women in person, they understand me in a way no one else can.”
Getting support from other writers on Twitter is especially important for aspiring authors without the ability to attend an MFA program or even find a local writing group—a common challenge for those outside of major metropolitan areas. “I made my first Twitter friends on a writing challenge with a hashtag probably ten years ago,” author Rachel Mans McKenny told me. “In a city, you have a lot of potential people with your interests you could meet, but living in a small community, I didn’t always. And, with young kids, it was easier to tweet.”
Being an active Twitter user within the literary community can also more indirectly impact an author’s work by developing the voice they eventually bring to their manuscript. Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer, who has been on the platform since 2012, found that, “After writing and deleting tens of thousands of turgid, truly dull prose for my book-in-progress, I realized that if I could get the voice I'd cultivated at Twitter—make your point, get in, get out, be funny—into book form, I might have something workable.” As he rightly notes, “it worked”; the hardcover edition of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style is now in its 13th hardcover printing.
Once a manuscript or book proposal is ready to be submitted, the connections formed on Book Twitter take on a whole new role. Those outside of the industry may not know that most traditional publishing houses do not accept unsolicited submissions from authors. For most, the first stop to getting published isn’t finding an editor, but rather, finding a literary agent—a notoriously gate-kept process known to grind many writers’ dreams to a halt.
Connecting with a literary agent on Twitter is one way some authors have managed to bypass the traditional querying process. Author Davon Loeb first crossed paths with Eric Smith, an agent at P.S. Literary, through a young adult writing contest in 2020, where the prize included a one hour consultation with the agent. Loeb’s submission only made it to the long-list, but the two stayed in touch via Twitter, and Smith followed the trajectory of his work over the next few years before eventually approaching him about representation.
“Without Twitter, Eric and I would never have connected, even though we are basically neighbors,” Loeb told me. “After years of Twitter retweets, likes, and comments, I am represented by Eric Smith of P.S. Literary, and it feels like a dream come true.”
In some instances, an entire book deal has been born wholecloth from Book Twitter. “I would not have a children’s book coming out next year if not for Twitter,” said bestselling author Connie Schultz, who currently has 262,900 Twitter followers. “I joked about writing a children’s book and calling it Tom the Troll is Blocked. That same day, the [publisher] of Razorbill Books, Casey McIntyre, saw the tweet and reached out to my agent. Her message, basically: ‘We want Connie to write that book.’” Lola Tames the Troll (new title) will hit shelves in Fall 2023.
I’d be remiss not to mention the hundreds of unpublished authors who connected with their literary agents through #PitMad—the annual Twitter pitch event in which writers posted a one tweet pitch for their unpublished manuscripts to be requested by agents and acquiring editors via liking the tweeted pitch—which sadly came to an end due to a burnt out volunteer staff in 2022, and cannot be sullied by Musk.
Once a manuscript is submitted to an editor for consideration (in most cases through the literary agent), an author’s Twitter following can impact not only whether their book is bought, but for how much. “The book deal value of a Twitter presence has always changed with the tides,” said Lucy Carson, a literary agent at The Friedrich Agency, who explained the value of an engaged following above all else. “An author whose insights, quips, and exchanges display that they're clearly part of a recognizable literary community, a group of people who are arguably excited for the potential book, who share interests and can clearly be counted on for meaningful support—that can hold a lot of weight.”
Even for authors without a huge platform, Twitter can have a real impact on book sales, and whether or not a book earns out (when the publisher recoups their investment from the book advance and an author starts to receive royalties). For example, despite only having ~4,600 followers, McKenny has generated significant sales for her 2020 novel, The Butterfly Effect, from Twitter. “Whenever I have a dumb, even unrelated tweet go viral, I’ve seen significant sales bumps, even bigger than from BookBub ads sometime,” she said. “My debut came out from a small press, so I didn’t have a huge marketing team behind me. I was able to earn out my advance, and I don’t know if I could say that without Twitter.”
While Carson notes the industry long ago moved past the days of assuming that followers equate to book buyers—they do not—a large and engaged social media audience continues to be a draw for publishers running uphill against the shrinking media landscape and limited marketing budgets to create the next bestseller. Who can blame them? An author tweeting their book link to their 100,000 followers costs the publisher exactly $0. By comparison, it would cost thousands to send the author to a handful of non-local book events or run a paid influencer campaign.
If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, there are many authors established and emerging alike whose most engaged social media audience would vanish with it. The value of that audience comes not just from some arbitrary number of followers, but also from the many connections made within this community. Those friendships cultivated over years of online and sometimes in-person activity will shout your Publisher’s Marketplace announcement from the rooftops. They’ll amplify your book’s pre-order link not just once, but consistently leading up to publication. They’ll retweet information about your book signings, cheer you on when you get a starred Publishers Weekly review, and feature your book in their newsletters. I’m sure the private equity firms circling Simon & Schuster would love to put a price on this type of online literary support network, but its pricelessness is what has so many writers upset at the thought of losing it.
It should surprise no one that marginalized individuals and those outside of the traditional literary establishment are most likely to be affected by the loss of Book Twitter. Korean-American author Kristin Meekhof says, “Many minority authors like myself use Twitter to gain access to certain people and platforms that traditionally aren't open to us.” When Meekhof tried to publish her book, A Widow’s Guide to Healing, she turned to Twitter to build the connections she felt she needed to include in her book proposal. She even managed to connect with Deepak Chopra, who wrote a cover blurb for the book, and Katie Couric, who interviewed her for Yahoo.
“People within the BiPOC community are often overlooked, and Twitter gives us potential and a unique access point in which to create sustaining professional relationships, engage with others we wouldn't otherwise be able to get ahold of, share a bit of our story, and elevate each other,” Meekhof said. If Book Twitter ends, she continued, “it would feel like the lights went out.”
Access to people you wouldn’t otherwise have access to is an important part of what makes Twitter so valuable in this community, and others. Independent Journalist Fiona Lowenstein, who uses they/them pronouns, saw how the platform helps chronically ill and disabled writers to connect after they first wrote about their experience with long COVID in April 2020. Their recently released book, The Long COVID Survival Guide, was almost entirely sourced from Twitter. They note that it would have been very difficult to accomplish the project without it.
“Heather Hogan, Morgan Stephens, and Karla Monterroso are all contributors to the book who have Long COVID and who I met on Twitter,” Lowenstein said. “I have developed deep professional relationships and friendships with them, and—as silly as it feels sometimes—this never would have happened without the bird app!” According to Lowenstein, even their publisher has been surprised by the support for the book displayed on Twitter.
Losing that promotional support network threatens more members of the literary community than just authors. Danny Caine, author and co-owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, KS, says that Twitter has been central to his bookselling career. “At a base level, I've met a great community of bookseller folks there, many of whom have become close real life friends,” Caine told me. “In terms of the store, the Raven has had a couple fun moments going viral that ended up being good for business.”
While Caine acknowledges that the question of how to sell books with tweets was always “a hard one to answer,” he noted several sales bumps and promotional opportunities born directly from the platform, including a tweet from journalist Shea Serrano directing his followers to buy books from the store, a tweet included in The Washington Post book critic Ron Charles’ newsletter that led to a brief appearance on The Today Show, and even a viral thread about Amazon that was eventually developed into a book, How to Resist Amazon and Why. Through all of this, Caine said, “Twitter has allowed the Raven to find its voice and find a nationwide audience in addition to our core folks in Lawrence, Kansas.”
Like nearly everyone I spoke to, Caine’s melancholy following Musk’s ascension is less about book sales than it is about the dissolution of a grassroots community nurtured over seventeen years. Only time will tell if Book Twitter survives, but at least for now, it seems the wave of defectors has slowed to a trickle. Perhaps the end isn’t quite as imminent as it felt last fall.
On the day Musk took over Twitter, I tweeted: “I’ve spent a decade of my life on this website, I’m not leaving until I have a book deal.” Although I posted this in jest, I was being serious about staying put. I cannot imagine leaving the platform I’ve invested 11 years of my life in because of a big billionaire baby. If and when I depart Twitter, it will be for personal reasons—like a therapist telling me to get the hell out for my mental health. But hey, if you’re a literary agent reading this, take a look at my Twitter profile. I’ve written tens of thousands of tweets—a book could be next.
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