How I got on NPR because of TikTok
I normally send this newsletter on Sundays but today is my birthday 🧁, so I’m sending this early and then signing off to spend time with my family and go leaf peeping.
Writers do not want to be on TikTok. They do not want to show their faces on camera. This is not their job! They say, “My job is to write the book. My publisher’s job is to sell it.” They’re worried about privacy concerns. They don’t know what to post! They’re afraid they’ll look stupid—or old.
I get it. Before I started making videos, I was also scared of being on camera and embarrassing myself!
One thing I love about TikTok is that it’s not a beauty contest like Instagram is. Your ideas and your creativity matter more than your good hair or your beautiful home.
To me, TikTok feels like a video game with levels. I get better at it, the more I play.
Over the last 18 months, I have been on TikTok for three reasons:
As a kind of “method writing” (I heard Angie Kim use this phrase at a reading on Thursday night and I love it; she and I both have backgrounds as actors)—to learn TikTok from the creator side, so that I could write about it in my hype house novel.
To make friends with creators in the BookTok community, and discover new books to read from their recommendations. In the summer of 2022, I did an outreach campaign to 100 creators about my novel Self Care. If you search the novel on TikTok, you can see all the videos that resulted from that campaign.
To grow a new audience of readers who are interested in the ways I think, talk, and write about internet culture—so that in the future, when my next novel is published, I’ll be able to share it with them.
In April, a friend of mine texted me this Times article about
, a former wellness influencer who left influencing to get a full-time job and start a Substack newsletter.I think Lee’s pivot illustrates what’s happening in digital culture right now: a shift way from mid-2010s, girlboss era, pastel-Canva-template influencer culture and toward the creator economy, where creators like Lee, or like me (the other Leigh), are earning income directly from our audiences by creating original work (like Substack newsletters), instead of looking hot online to shill gut health programs for brands before we age out.
I made a TikTok video of what I texted to my friend who sent me the Times article. I don’t script any of my TikTok content. My video content is more informal than an essay or an article—I’m not a perfectionist on TikTok because, in fact, the algorithm doesn’t reward perfectionism. It rewards chaos and mess. If I leave something out of my video, that’s okay, because someone will ask about it in the comments section and then I can respond with another video.
My video went viral (it now has 240,000 views) and many commenters agreed with me and many other commenters disagreed with me. This can trigger my feelings of Being Mad Online, which aren’t good for my psychological wellbeing, so after a few days of being addicted to my phone, I decided to stop reading the comments.
Which means I missed this:
Oops!
In May, I finally connected with Claire, and we talked about influencers and the creator economy. I’d actually already been following Claire’s content on TikTok—she does amazing day in the life vlogs about working the night shift at NPR’s Morning Edition.
Claire reached out to me again last week about a story she was working on about a clothing boutique for tween girls in Dallas, TX that went viral on TikTok, and you can listen to that story on NPR right here.
Leigh Stein, a novelist and cultural critic, says that while many girls want to accelerate womanhood — adult women are romanticizing "girl" trends like "girl dinner, hot girl walk, rat girl, Girlboss [and] that girl."
"I just wonder," said Stein, "have we already run through all the possibilities of girl aesthetics for women, that now the most interesting or surprising thing is actual children, actual girls?"
As a cultural critic, I’m on TikTok because I believe it’s one of the best places on the internet for discoverability right now. On what other platform, would my ideas about influencer culture have reached 240,000 people? Do you think 240,000 people read my essay in LitHub about BookTok? Will 240,000 people read this newsletter? 🙃
Happy Birthday, Leigh! I was thinking that the next ultimate birthday 🥳 girl dinner would be ordering off the children’s menu! Great piece.
This is all so interesting. I am stumped by the girl thing - my title "woman" is hard won, and i'll stick with that. Leigh, what's the thing about "girl math" that i keep seeing on threads? Is it a joke? It feels like a slight, but it's mostly coming from women. Please advise. Also happy birthday!