A finger is poised to press a button on a computer keyboard. Text reads: Leaving Meta and X without losing your author platform.

Building an Author Platform without Meta and X

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by

Erin Alladin
in

So you want to break up with Meta and X because, well, they’ve aligned themselves with the dismantling of democracy and human rights, and you aren’t about that. Removing their influence from your life and the lives of your followers is one tangible thing you can do to resist fascism. But you’ve been struggling to make a clean break because you depend on the discoverability those spaces give you. What can you do to stay true to your morals without losing your platform? This post will help you assemble an action plan.

An important note: I’m not a tech insider, so many resources recommended in this post are influenced by the research of others with more expertise. It may need updating from time to time as new information comes to light.

Jump to:

Capture Your Audience in a Newsletter

You’ve heard this a million times, and that’s because it’s true: owning your own audience through a newsletter is the most effective and most future-proof way to market yourself digitally. Your newsletters will never be subject to the whims of algorithms. They reliably land in your subscribers’ inboxes as often as you send them. And the content is up to you. If you’ve built relationships with your audience through chatty, newsy life updates on Instagram, you can do the same in your newsletter. If your online strategy is built around strategic value offers and calls to action, that works too.

You can attract people to your newsletter by offering them downloadable freebies (called lead magnets) in exchange for their email address. You can track the statistics of how many people open each email and click on links, which will help you to hone your skill at writing effective subject lines and content. And as you get more practiced, you can even split your audience into lists based on their interests and send them targeted content that will be sure to capture their attention.

Powering Your Newsletter

In the age of anti-spam laws, sending a newsletter by manually pasting email addresses into your email client’s BCC line isn’t a great idea. In many countries, including Canada, every newsletter you send needs to include a simple, easy-to-find mechanism for unsubscribing. You also need subscribers to opt in in the first place, rather than manually adding them to your list and hoping they like it. For best practices, a double opt-in that prompts new subscribers to confirm their email address is ideal. You can accomplish this through newsletter software or on a newsletter platform. Let’s compare the two.

Newsletter Software

With newsletter software you can design professional-looking emails that will be sent to the inboxes of anyone on your mailing list, which you can build using the software’s landing pages and automation features. I find MailerLite to be user-friendly and have found no red flags about their business practices or politics. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is another popular choice. However, if you want to explore companies that make deliberately ethical, value-based business decisions, check out this list from Ethical Network. 

Benefits:

  • Full control over how you access your audience
  • Flexible design options
  • Lots of features for creating landing pages, pop-ups, and funnels to capture new subscribers and (if desired) convince existing subscribers to pay for products and services
  • Most free plans offer solid analytics

Drawbacks:

  • Free plans tend to limit either how many subscribers you can have or how many emails you can send per month.
  • No built-in feature for paid subscriptions
  • You may need to own a domain name with an associated email address to use them. For security reasons, the days of putting a gmail address in the “from” line are dwindling.

Newsletter Platforms

This hybrid between blogs and newsletters began with Substack, but since that platform has been reluctant to stop making money from pro-Nazi accounts and other extremists who promote violence, many writers are seeking alternatives. Beehiiv and Ghost are frequently recommended.

Benefits:

  • Lots of guidance and templates
  • Built-in options for creating a paid newsletter, or one that has both a free portion and a paywalled portion, or a free one that subscribers can support financially if they wish
  • Some platforms let you build ads into your newsletter for monetization.
  • Built-in discoverability features for people who are consuming similar newsletters on the same platform

Drawbacks:

  • You’re still depending on a platform to keep offering the features you need, which may not always remain in their best interest.
  • The platform wants you to use their monetization features, of which they may get a cut, so they don’t offer the same breadth of tools for marketing funnels and welcome sequences (these are optimized for selling your goods and services).
  • Some platforms don’t offer a free tier.

Whichever path you choose, it’s a good idea to make regular backups of your mailing list. That way, even if something unexpected happens to your host, you still have your most valuable asset: direct access to your audience.

Build a Real-World Platform

As you’ll see when we come to the social media section below, the social internet has become fragmented. Users fleeing Meta and X are experimenting with all sorts of new networks, and although speaking to a niche audience is a perfect move for many creatives, others find it demoralizing to know there aren’t billions of users tapping into the same network. The solution? Depend less on social media for your promotion. Making real connections in person has always had the highest conversion rate, so let’s re-learn how to do it. Bonus: building strong local communities is the best thing you can be doing to fight fascism, which depends on dividing people from one another.

Join Organizations

Whatever topic you write about, there are bound to be organizations for people with an interest in them—everything from birdwatching clubs to support groups for family members of people with a rare disease. You might already be in touch with some organizations in order to do your research. Become a member and get involved: volunteer in some capacity, attend events, or join a sub-committee. You’ll develop relationships with the very people you’re writing for. This will improve your sense of your audience’s needs and lay the groundwork for authentic opportunities to tell people about your work. Just make sure you don’t enter a space with the sole intention to engage in self-promotion. It will be immediately obvious that you aren’t truly interested in community-building, and you’ll turn people off your work instead.

Join Professional Associations

I’m a member of Garden Communicators International, the Writers’ Union of Canada, Editors Canada, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Each one offers me opportunities for networking, professional development, learning from my peers, sharing my expertise, and promoting myself in some way. Many of these memberships also confer credibility within their professional sphere. Some author associations help you form support groups with other authors who have similar publication dates to cross-promote each others’ books. If you can’t afford a membership this year, find out if the association you’re interested in offers reduced rates for those experiencing financial need.

Develop Your Speaking Career

Come up with subjects you can speak about for an hour that would bring value to an audience. Create slide decks for them and write some catchy titles and short one-paragraph descriptions. Design a one-sheet that promotes you as a professional speaker, featuring your head shot, bio, book(s), and presentation descriptions. Create a professional speaking page on your website and request testimonials to add to it. Send your one-sheet to organizations that hire speakers. Respond to calls for pitches from conferences. Whenever you present, pass around a sign-up sheet for your newsletter and, if possible, set up a table to sell your books. Chat with attendees and make connections. Charge a fair price to cover your time, expertise, and travel.

Get Involved with Local Events

When people get familiar with a local author, they are often enthusiastic about promoting them to others and choosing their books as gifts. You can hand-sell books at local markets and special events, offer writing workshops through your library, offer other kinds of workshops related to the content of your book, do author visits in schools if you write for kids, join local writing groups, read at open mic nights, apply to book festivals, donate books as prizes for local fundraisers, run literacy programming, and more. If you find yourself wishing that your town had a certain kind of event or programming available, try making it happen yourself. You might even be able to apply for funding to pay yourself for your time and material costs.

Relocate Your Social Media

Aside from not being owned by Zuckerberg or Musk, many of the platforms listed below have one feature in common: they don’t use algorithms to decide what content to show you. On the one hand, this means you’re going to need to use some brain power to decide which topics to follow. On the other hand, making those choices will give you a feed full of the content you actually want to consume—not one that prioritizes content designed to manipulate your emotions and harness your attention at any cost.  

When you sign up, take a few minutes to understand the platform’s prompts to follow hashtags and feeds you’re interested in. If you need to look up advice for making the most of the platform online, do that. It’s a small time investment now that will make all the future time you spend on social media more valuable. We’re living through an information war, and being deliberate about your social media use is a powerful way to arm yourself.

Bluesky

Much of the literary community has moved from X to Bluesky, which is easy to do now that you can port many aspects of your Twitter account directly over. Its layout closely resembles X, but you can use it for photos and videos too. Author Debbie Ridpath Ohi has been a leader in getting the Canadian kidlit and YA community oriented and organized on this platform, and you can read her informative guide  to get started.

On Bluesky you create your own list of themed feeds that are fed by keywords. You can also scroll posts by the people you follow. Want to build your follow list from scratch? You can get a head start by following starter packs, which are lists of related accounts that users have compiled, for example Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s starter pack of accounts related to Canadian Kidlit and YA or the Creative Writers of Canada starter pack. You can follow the whole pack with one click or selectively choose accounts from it.

Bluesky Flashes

Bluesky’s answer to Instagram is still in its Beta phase, but you can get early access by signing up.

Pinksky

If you don’t want to join the Beta for Flashes, Pinksky was created by a third party using Bluesky’s AT Protocol network, meaning that you can sign into it using your Bluesky account. It filters your Bluesky feed to show you just the photos and videos from accounts you follow.

imgur

If you’re an illustrator, you might be get some benefit from imgur, which is an image-based platform that can be accessed without a login. Posts are sorted by tags, and popular ones are up-voted by viewers for increased exposure.

Mastodon and the Fediverse

Mastodon is a decentralized, open-source social network that is not owned or controlled by a single individual or corporation. Like other social networks, you can make posts and comment on them. The big difference is that instead of joining via a single default login page, you choose one of many servers, or “instances,” created and managed by individual communities. You aren’t limited to communicating only with people from your server, but your server does decide the moderation and community rules for its members. YouTuber The Linux Experiment has a useful video explaining Mastodon and how to start using it. If you prefer to read instructions, check out Fedi.Tips.

Like Bluesky, Mastodon uses a protocol that lets it communicate directly with other social networks that use the same protocol. Together, these networks and apps are called the Fediverse. Other Fediverse spaces include Pixelfed (think Instagram), Friendica (Facebook-ish), and BookWyrm (has some similarities to Goodreads).

LinkedIn

Depending on what you write about, LinkedIn could be a strong asset for you. Demonstrate your credentials in your subject area and make connections with others in the field. Just make sure you take a cue from how others use the platform and craft posts that offer insight or benefit for others on a professional level. This will build up relationships and goodwill for when you do write posts that promote your book.

In Conclusion

As you make decisions about where to commit your online presence, I want to leave you with a final thought. All corporations that run online platforms need to pay their overhead and turn a profit. While many of us are not in a position to pay premiums for every service we use, it behooves us to remember this truth: if we aren’t paying for something, then we are the product. Ask yourself how a company is benefitting from your attention, your audience, or your content. Make sure you’re okay with the contribution you’re making to their footprint in the world.

 If you have further insights on any of the platforms named or not named in this post, leave a comment below or reach out via email so we can all keep learning.

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