Somewhere this week, a debut novelist sat through a pre-recorded webinar and was told to build a platform. Post daily. Stay consistent. Be authentic at scale. Show up, and the readers will come. It was decent enough advice in 2015. A decade on, the trade is still singing from the same hymn sheet, and the novelist will go home and dutifully do as they’re told.
The advice we pass on to new authors is overdue a rewrite.
Let’s start with the readers who won't be there at all. Australia's under-16 ban went live in December and wiped out 4.7 million accounts. Denmark has agreed an under-15 version due to become law this year. Our own government is, true to form, consulting about whether to consult. The dominoes are falling, and a huge slice of the readers we coach authors to chase won't legally be there to be chased.
The platforms we're sending them to are running on fumes. Average Facebook engagement now sits at 0.15%. On X it’s slipped even lower, to 0.12%. Around half of what lands in my Facebook feed now comes from accounts I never chose to follow, so even the people who opted to follow your author don't reliably see a word they post. And the audience everyone insists on invoking, the BookTok generation, is switching off fastest. Sprout Social's most recent survey found half of Gen Z have muted or unfollowed a brand or creator purely for posting what they see as AI slop – a sharper reaction than any older demographic.
So why does the new author advice survive? Because building a platform is free, and because it looks a lot like reportable data. A follower count is a tidy number to drop on a slide. It lets everyone feel marketing is happening while the actual work is handed back to the author, unpaid, to fit in between their day job and the next manuscript. It also keeps the spend where the industry prefers it - on the author's side of the ledger. I’ve done the eleven o'clock posting. It moved nothing I could measure, and I measure everything. Socialinsider is my bedtime reading. I am not a fun date.
Stand at any festival bar and you'll meet authors able to recite their engagement rate to two decimal places and not name a single sale it produced. We kept posting regardless, because stopping felt like surrender, and because every voice in the room told us the alternative was invisibility.
What actually shifts a pre-order is duller, slower, and a great deal harder to fake.
A mailing list you own, words written to people who asked to hear from you. Words no algorithm can throttle on a whim. Mine runs to just over six hundred names. Six hundred people who asked to be there are worth more of my attention than a follower count I can't convert, because the line to the reader is direct, and nobody is deciding on my behalf who gets to see it.
Booksellers who’ve read the book matter so much. The Heath in Birmingham has hand-sold my work to readers who would never have met it in a fast-moving Insta-feed. One bookseller doing that beats a month of posts, because a reader trusts the person across the counter more than they trust any Big Tech algorithm. Podcasts, where a host gives you forty minutes and an audience that chose to be there – murder to attribute but worth doing anyway. Substack is a mailing list that learned to recommend the writers who hang about next door, and it’s currently doing the discovery work the big platforms walked away from. And a pre-order incentive that’s had more than five minutes behind it: not a tote bag, not an enamel pin or a postcard nobody asked for, but something that genuinely rewards the people willing to buy a book months before they can open it.
None of this comes free, and I’d rather say so than sell anyone a fresh fantasy. An author mailing list is a slow build, and most weeks it feels like shouting into the fridge. The reach is smaller. That’s the part the advice never mentions: you trade the dream of going viral for an audience that’s real but modest. I’ll take real and modest. Viral was always a lottery ticket the trade encouraged authors to treat as a pension.
The platforms are far from dead. But they’ve stopped being the answer to a question we decided not to carry on examining. Hand a debut author the 2015 playbook today and you’ve given them a full calendar and a disappointing royalty statement. The least we owe them is advice with this year's date on it.
Mo Fanning’s fifth novel, Lisa Doyle is Absolutely Fine, was published on 18 June by Spring Street Books
