Your Nonfiction Idea Is Good, But Your Social Media Following Needs to Be Better
It happened to me again.
A rejection from a literary agent.
I’m used to those by now. I have hundreds.
But this rejection was the second in a single week that held the same rationale.
Publishers want to see large numbers on social media accounts. Plenty of followers means people trust what you say and that, as a result, there’s a high likelihood for the publisher that you’ll sell a decent number of books. Sell a decent number of books and the publisher rakes in the green stuff (or at the very least, breaks even).
I simply didn’t have enough followers.
It didn’t matter that, by the agents’ own admissions, my book concepts were good and had merit. All that mattered was that I was known online.
Writing industry expert Jane Friedman has done the research, and the data shows that it is still possible for fiction authors to land publishing deals without a big online presence. She also notes that agents can use the “you need more followers” as a shortcut during rejection because the reasons for rejecting a specific premise can be quite complicated.
But even in Friedman’s words, “It’s true that if you’re seeking a Big Five publisher (which requires an agent), everyone will be looking for a platform to support the marketing and promotion of a nonfiction book.”
In the video below, I outline my biggest grievances around the fact that the Big Five publishers use social media numbers to gatekeep projects (particularly in nonfiction), which likely has contributed to the increase in agents rejecting books due to a lack of online platform.
[Transcript summary]
Well, guys, it happened to me again this week, not once, but twice.
So, what am I talking about? I had some proposals on a nonfiction book rejected.
Now, I have hundreds of rejections, okay? But the reason these got under my skin was because of why I got rejected. Wasn’t because my premise was bad. The agents — they’re lovely agents, by the way. They were super nice! — but they said that the merit of the books was good. They said that it was — lovely premises. But the reason why I got rejected was because I didn’t have enough followers on social media.
Now, I take issue with this for a lot of reasons. But the first one is that social media follower accounts can be so easily manipulated. We all know that there are individuals and companies out there that will sell you followers. So, to me, it’s not a very good judgment of whether or not somebody actually is active and has authority.
Secondly, the platform is not necessarily a good measure of overall reach. So, for example, you might have somebody who really doesn’t want to be on social media, has a very small following, right? But they are so connected in their industry. They’re experts. They know everybody. But online, it looks like nothing. If you are a publisher and you are ignoring that, you’re missing the whole big picture of who they can actually sell to, if you’re only looking at the social media followers.
And thirdly, it kind of just makes the whole thing feel like one big, giant popularity contest. If writing is supposed to be something that is merit based, that’s not how it should be. You should just be able to write your book and have that be the book and have that be what gets you in the door. But it’s not apparently like that, at least for nonfiction. For fiction, it’s a little bit different. Jane Friedman, she’s got some really good data on this that, you know, kind of answers this question of whether or not you really do need social media. But even she says that, you know, if you are a — you’re trying to work with a Big Five publisher for a nonfiction work, they are going to want to see what your follower count is like.
The last issue that I have is that it really puts debut nonfiction authors who don’t have a lot of money in a bind, because if you can’t get past this social media issue, then you really have some — self publishing is your last option. And it can be a really good choice. Don’t get me wrong. I advocate for it all the time. But if you don’t have a lot of money to pay for things like your self-marketing, your cover design and all of those things, then what are you going to do? So, it — because then it becomes an economic issue and a class issue, because you end up having poor authors who can’t afford things stuck not publishing just because they don’t have a lot of social media followers, which I think is ridiculous. So, anytime that that becomes a class issue, I take real issue with it.
And all I am asking is that as we look at what the industry is becoming, we really have to make some hard choices about what we are going to advocate for and stand for. And as writers, we need to have a voice about this. We need to say — we need to be able to have a choice of whether or not we have a social media following or not, whether we want to be online or not. Because not everybody does. I know I’m way more introverted. I’m kind of torn on it, because it takes so much time to have social media platforms, and yet I’m kind of introverted. So, it’s hard for me to do in person. So, you really have to leave some personal allowances for the kind of people that authors are, because that is all over the map. And to say that they have to be online to publish a nonfiction book, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.
So, let me know in the comments what you think about all this. I’ll let you know what I hear, too. Take care. Bye.