If you're an author, why are you so bad at Instagram?

There’s an idea, increasingly true, that to be an author, you need to also be an influencer.

If you are new here (HELLO), I am an author. This is my book. It came out in February in the US and will come out in September in a bunch of other places around the world. I have another book coming out next year, but more on that soon.

So anyway. When I mention the influencer thing, people tend to say: “Oh! Well. Then I suppose you should become an influencer.”

And yet! Here we are.

I always dreamed of being an author, from the time I was little, so you would think I would work harder at making sure people on the internet know about my books. But I’m not doing a very good job at that. The first reason that I’m not an influencer is because being an influencer is hard, both from a time perspective (making high-quality videos takes a long time) and from a psychological well-being perspective (staring at yourself for a long time cannot be healthy for the soul).

But the real reason I am not an influencer, cannot seem to make myself want to become one no matter how useful it may be to my career, is that I don’t like my brain on content creation.

I have this theory that your primary mode of communication becomes your internal monologue. When I spend time writing books, my internal monologue looks like the draft of a book: It’s slow, nuanced, meandering, and possesses a capacious ability to be edited. It looks like this:

Back in the day, I used Twitter. I stopped because I hated what it did to my internal monologue. I felt like all my ideas were arriving as one-liners and political clapbacks. Like this:

When I think about creating video content for Instagram or TikTok, I think about cataloguing my own life. Which is not to say that’s how all influencers make videos—but it is how I start to think. I think about my face narrating my life to my phone camera in my bedroom. My internal monologue is a hall of mirrors:

The manuscript I’m currently editing is about music, so I found myself reading David Byrne’s book How Music Works—and he talks about the venue shaping the sound. An organ sounds good in a cathedral but wouldn’t fare well in a cramped bar. Club music works in a warehouse but not so much at a picnic.

I think ideas work the same way. Like gases, they shrink or expand to fit their containers. If my container—my medium—is a one-minute video, then all my ideas will become one-minute video ideas. They will allow me to make better one-minute videos. But I don’t think they’ll help me write better or more creative books.

I said the book I was working on was about music, but it’s also about AI. At one point, after spending a few months talking to an AI chatbot, our singer-songwriter character says:

And I wonder if this is how everyone feels. If they feel like they’re losing the ability to form a complete sentence—that the words are falling off the ends of their thoughts one by one. That their ideas are shifting to fit the size of a container that is limitless, trite, wordy, needy, sycophantic, and nearly instantaneous.

Which is not to say that I think AI is inherently bad. I just wonder if we pay enough attention to the way it shapes the way we move through the world even when our screens are dark. I wonder if this is universally nerve-wracking—or if it’s only nerve-wracking to the people who really like their internal monologues, who write books, who don’t want a grand rewiring.

As I wrote this piece, I imagined how it would work if I turned it into an Instagram Reel. You know. Just to see. But then I thought how little I wanted to make an Instagram Reel—spending all that time with social media brain. And then I thought—I guess I could just make it with AI. And then I thought: Stop generating.

Currently reading: Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. After a few books that felt homework-y, this was all atmosphere and vibes. Actually wanted to go read it instead of partaking in the ritual of 40 short videos before bed!

Non-urgent thought of the week: Living for the fact that Levain cookies were, apparently, originally developed for an Ironman.

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