how to get other people to share your stuff
Ten years ago, it was enough to be good at Twitter. Roxane Gay, Brandon Taylor, and Elisa Gabbert all built audiences by posting funny, smart, and/or gossipy one-liners. (Anyone remember this?) Their replies were filled with adoring fans. Twitter was the easiest platform for writers to master. No one would know if you’d washed your hair or changed out of your pajamas. You could tweet while you were at the OBGYN.
And when you published a personal essay in Modern Love or Salon or The Hairpin, you tweeted the link and people actually read it—and shared it! Writers even got book deals for being good at Twitter.
Then publishers started to figure out that having a large Twitter following did not necessarily mean having a large book-buying audience. I’ve been saying for years that Twitter is the worst platform on which to promote your book; no one is on Twitter to shop.
Once Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, many authors left in protest. Now we’re scattered all over the place: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack.
What this means for you is that it’s gotten much harder to get attention for your writing because your audience is no longer concentrated in one place.
On the one hand, this is a good thing. The writers of Twitter were primarily sharing their work with… the other writers of Twitter. Things could get a little sycophantic over there. It was easy to assemble a mob when you found a target to publicly shame.
On the other hand, when you have an essay or a Substack post or an interview or a new novel that you want more people to know about, where are you supposed to go? What are you supposed to do?
Step One
The first thing to do is to ask yourself: “Why would someone share this?”
What would make someone text a link to your esssay/poem/short story/Substack post/podcast interview to a friend?
Is it funny? Shocking? Life-changing? Illuminating? Gossipy? Moving? Entertaining? Relatable?
What’s going to inspire a bookseller to write a shelf talker about your book? What would make them want to share it with more readers?
At the end of this rave review of Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker,
says Chelsea reached out to him directly: she’d obviously been following his content and pitched it to him as a book he would love. She learned his taste.
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I posted this to Substack Notes. It’s exactly the kind of quip I would have tweeted in 2015, but if I posted this on X today, it would get three likes. On Substack Notes, it got 585 likes and 41 restacks. Why? Well, it’s a joke for writers (and writers are on Substack Notes). People shared it because it’s funny/relatable.
Step Two
Once you understand why someone would share your work, you’re ready to personally ask other people to share it.
When I published a piece in LitHub on Tavi Gevinson’s Taylor Swift fan zine in April, I DM’d and emailed specific people who I thought might post about it, across different platforms. Kate Lindsay included it in her weekly Sunday Scroll to 30,000 subscribers.
Who should you ask?
Your friend whose day would absolutely be made if they read your piece
Friends and colleagues whose work you have shared in the past
Extremely online people you know who are already sharing content they’re reading/listening to/watching
Influential writers/thinkers whom you follow and with whom you have already established a small connection (e.g., you’re a paid subscriber to their newsletter, you’re active in the comments section, you’ve already sent them a complimentary email about their latest book, etc.)
How should you ask them?
I always recommend warming up a cold connection before you ask for a favor. The first email you ever send someone should not be an email in which you ask them to do something for you.
I also think you will have more luck if you make those asks personal instead of a BCC email.
Basically, you’re writing a pitch. You’re letting someone know why you think they would be interested in your new piece/book/upcoming class/whatever and then asking them to share it (be specific). The better you know this person, the more targeted your pitch can be. If you follow someone’s newsletter, and you know they have a section dedicated to links every week, you can nominate your piece for that section.
wrote a guest post for me a couple weeks ago because she emailed me such a great pitch.If you can’t think of a single person you could ask to share a piece of your writing, here are my tips on making friends online.
If you find yourself plateaued at 642 Instagram followers and 220 readers on Substack, building relationships with other people who have similar audiences and asking them to share your work can help you grow your audience.
Lastly, be judicious with your asks! Spend your favor requests on the pieces of writing that are the most important to you.
Book Publishing 101
Dulma Altan is one of my TikTok mentors and she invited me on her podcast to talk about book publishing and the viral marketing campaign I did on Instagram to promote Self Care. If you’re relatively new to my Substack, I think this is a great intro to who I am and how I think about book publishing!
Chat Room
Paid subscribers to Attention Economy have access to my upcoming conversation with BookTok creator Stacey Yu on October 11th. Stacey has over 100,000 followers on the literary fiction side of BookTok and I’ll ask her about best practices for writers who want to get their books on TikTok.
On October 24th at 1pm EST, I’ll be talking to literary agent Allison Hunter, a founding partner at Trellis Literary Management and one of the top dealmakers in the “debut fiction” category on Publishers Marketplace.
Thanks for encouraging us to ask for those shares. And how to do it. I feel squidgy enough posting stuff and asking people to read it, so asking for shares feels extra scary, but that's illogical and asking is okay.
Can’t wait to listen to the podcast! You always give great/hilarious interviews.