Ethical promotion in a digital wasteland

#hifolks #booktok #selfpromo

For me, the hardest part of this process has been establishing an online presence (i.e. the Create Author Assets section from The Checklist). I was only ever active on Facebook, and I left that account behind in March 2020 for…a lot of reasons. It’s been much harder to stay connected with friends and up-to-date on my favorite fandoms, but I found that I was ok without Facebook and filled the void with their somewhat more secure Messenger service and a deeply curated Reddit feed. Then the Reddit API Controversy hit in 2023, and I was left only with YouTube, which barely counts as a social media. Two years later YouTube allowed conspiracy and misinformation content to flourish, and my boycott expanded to the point that I basically didn’t exist online.

Though I more closely identify with Ben Wyatt from Parks and Recreation, I also see huge swaths of myself in Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place, and like that legendary anxious professor I struck out to find the least evil social media platforms on which to promote my books.

I immediately nixed Reddit, YouTube, and any Meta-owned platforms (see above), and dove into some of the others I hadn’t used before. X was a non-starter, as was TikTok, and Snapchat, Bluesky, and Pinterest felt like they wouldn’t be worth the effort since their user base was so small. That really only left Goodreads, which is mostly independent but still owned by Amazon.

Fine! I’ll just have an author website and that’s it. But wait – unless I go the extremely overwhelming self-hosted route, it’s just as likely that my site will be hosted by AWS…

I spent several weeks in the throes of indecision, reading defeatist blog posts and wondering if I should just give up, sell out, or simply announce my book at local libraries and bookstores in person and call it done. In the end, it was the wisdom of The Good Place (expressed to me by several different friends) that saved me.

For those that haven’t seen it (you should), spoiler warning for a show that ended six years ago. In the third season, it is discovered that the point system which determines the positive or negative value of your actions is deeply flawed. An action like giving flowers to a loved one in the 1500s would net you +145 points, while a similar action today would result in -4 points. That’s because in the 21st century, the flowers were grown with toxic pesticides, picked by exploited migrant workers, and delivered across the country in gas guzzling trucks.

The phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” gets thrown around a lot, and it’s one that rings true for me in many ways. Some folks respond to this as if it absolves them of any personal guilt, while others use it to punish themselves in the name of their principles. I was in the latter camp, and realized I needed to come more toward the middle. I want to give my books a decent chance, while also drawing some clear lines.

In the end, I decided on hosting by WordPress for my personal site and using social media accounts on Goodreads, Instagram, and Bluesky. This keeps me from the most directly evil sites while also ensuring a decent level of possible exposure. It’s not perfect and I’m honestly still troubled by it, but it’s as far as my morals would let me go. This question is going to be answered differently by every new author, and at the end of the day you just have to be able to live with your own choices.

Trigger warnings: murder, fascism, helplessness

P.S. I can’t write a blog post about the ethics of self-promotion without addressing the state of the world (and specifically the USA). It is horrifying to watch a government so brazenly get away with murder. A little over a year ago, I thought that their support of the genocide in Palestine was as bad as it could get. Now we have trigger-happy masked agents disappearing folks off the street with zero accountability.

Self-publishing, blog posts, and even simply writing seems downright negligent on the worst days. As an introvert, I feel even more helpless than most but I have to do something to speak out against what’s happening. I’ve stayed sane by writing postcards to swing states, attending local protests/marches, and e-mailing my representatives (as prompted by Indivisible). It’s not perfect, and I’m constantly trying to find that balance between activism and art.

I’ll leave you today with a relevant blog from one of my favorite authors: Alix E. Harrow. Her words on this topic (see “at the crossroads”) are far better than mine.