Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

You’ll have to excuse me as I’m currently on holidays, and the absence of the routine of heading into the office daily has thrown off my brain a little. Today, I wanted to muse about something quite personal to me. I had, for  quite a while, taken myself off most social media — I was still on Facebook a very little, and continued to watch YouTube videos — but the rest of them were used only to post a link to my blog post (such as BlueSky), or not at all (TikTok, looking at you). But I have since returned, albeit slowly and distantly.

On YouTube, for example, I’ve created a new channel where I will be uploading videos specifically about my writing, and writing journey, even if only tangentially related. The old YouTube channel, which has all of my subscriptions, will not be uploading anything at all. That does mean I will be building up a subscriber base entirely from scratch, which, honestly, isn’t so terrible. I had 75-ish subscribers. That’s not nothing, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a lot.

I needed to create a bit of separation for myself on these platforms, particularly the visual media ones, so starting from scratch seemed like a good idea, and an easier thing to do than going back over my other videos and getting rid of them to try and clean up the channel in order to offer something more focused.

For a similar reason, I returned to TikTok, but I’m going much slower with that one. TikTok excels as drawing you in and keeping you there. I have things to do; books to write, paintings to paint, languages to learn… and staying on that site is a great way to achieve none of it. So, I’m keeping my interactions minimal there.

Actually, I’m keeping my interactions minimal everywhere. I’m trying hard to maintain a balance in my life.

Which creates something of a problem. You see, in order to market effectively, especially as a writer without a large fan base, self-published or (and) published by a very small press, we must do the bulk of the work; we must make ourselves as available as possible. You have to be on social media to be seen. You have to interact with folks to build a community, and form relationships with your readers, or to be seen by potential new readers.

The need for a social media presence is very plain for anyone entering any creative field hoping to make a living from it. Which means, increasingly, the development of weird para-social relationships, and the very strange cults of personality that can come with it. The more we put ourselves out there, especially when we’re not directly promoting a work (a thing I have learnt is called ‘soft selling.’ Dear literally everyone, I was just trying to make a connection. I’m not trying to sell myself, or even my stuff, all the damned time), means that we ourselves are, increasingly, the product being promoted. The more of a product we become, the more other folks feel entitled to us as people, rather than our works (though there is a while lot of entitlement that some folks have about creative works. That is a (extremely loud and aggressive) rant for another occasion).

This commodification of writers is absolutely terrifying to me. I am not a product. I am a person. I love connecting with other people, but as more and more people take note of us, presenting ourselves on social media, more and more people seem to forget that we, on the other side of their screens, are people. People with lives and dreams, not products to be consumed, or made available on demand.

We’re just people, albeit with a particular set of skills (if none of you read that in Liam Neeson’s voice, I shall be very disappointed) that we’re using to try and generate some sort of living from. But we, ourselves, are not the thing we’re trying to sell.

Yet we must, in some way or form, sell ourselves in order to sell our work. After all, we’re told, if the audience likes us, they’re more likely to buy our work. Which… yeah. Of course. That makes perfect sense. And that is less than ideal, especially for someone like me, who is quite uncomfortable with a lot of attention.

Marketing has always been something creative people had to engage in to one degree or another. Writers used to have help from their publishing houses, but the big houses are continually looking for ways to increase their profits, which means often slashing entire departments. Which departments go? Marketing is usually the first. It used to be that publishing with a big publisher meant a lot of marketing support. That is decreasingly true, and a lot of authors published with the big publishing houses are doing just as much marketing work as the rest of us, who are published with small presses (or ourselves) who do not have any budget for marketing. Editing also takes the hit when presses seek to earn themselves more money.

That’s some nonsense right there, but I digress.

The challenge is, therefore, how to get seen without turning ourselves into things. How to sell books (or art, or furniture) without becoming the consumable ourselves.

I don’t know how I’m going to walk that exceptionally fine line, especially now that I am determined to find a way to make writing my primary (and comfortable) income.

Since I have no idea how to market, the point is probably moot, but still, I am employing some strategies that I hope very much will help straddle the line between selling my work, and avoiding becoming the consumable myself.

First, I am limiting how much my face is seen on the visual media I upload. I’m not sitting in front of a camera talking. I have started uploading videos with my voice over other images. I have no interest in fame. I want my books to be wildly popular, but I would also like to go out in public without fear of my day being interrupted. This isn’t to say I won’t sometimes be talking to the camera, (maybe I’ll get popular enough for an interview of some kind, for example) but that will be limited.

Second, I’m very deliberately limiting my time on social media. I love connecting with people, but I must, for my own sanity, draw a hard line on time spent online. It started on this very site, actually. I really love all the comments you lovely readers leave on my posts, when they are left. And I value them a great deal. So I try to respond as much as possible (where appropriate, sometimes folks aren’t talking to me, and that’s more than alright), but only until the Friday after the post goes live. I figured a few days was more than manageable, as the comments are not an enormous number, and I do enjoy chatting with folks here.

On actual social media, I am doing the same, more or less. I have less than ten subscribers on YouTube (no surprise, I created the channel late in August, and only uploaded two videos… In September), so that’s not really an issue. But should, for some unknown reason, that channel start to take off, I’ve decided that I’ll do the same. I’ll only respond to comments until four or so days following the upload, and even then, I’ll be limiting that to ten minutes a day and then I will just let it go.

The same is true for TikTok. I am permitted no more than fifteen minutes a day on TikTok, and that will include answering any questions/responding to comments on anything I upload, and only for four or so days after the upload.

BlueSky and Facebook will remain as they are — places I visit mostly to put up content and then leave again. I don’t get much interaction on Facebook and even less on BlueSky, so that’s easy.

I also have a Ko-Fi, where folks who hardcore support me can throw me a dollar a month for some minor (until I can escape the rat race and will have more time for creation) perks. Those people get the majority of my attention, but as they are extremely few in number, that’s an easy one and doesn’t take up much time at all. If ever that somehow gets more people, I will be creating the same sort of boundaries.

As writing will, hopefully, be a source of income for me, I do fear that creating these kinds of boundaries will alienate people who have become accustomed to always having their creator of choice at their disposal. Sternly enforcing my limits will probably keep a goodly number of people away. But then, I think I would much rather a smaller group who respect these boundaries than the alternative, even if it does make it so much harder to earn a living.

And still, the tension between the author as a person, and the author as a product exists. Our livelihoods may well depend on how we negotiate this arena. I have spent a considerable time wrestling with this reality, my discomfort with the idea of being recognisable, and my desire to earn a living from my writing (and thus the need for social media).

I don’t really have a solution, and my fairly rigid boundary setting may yet ultimately backfire, but there has to be some way to maintain (and enforce) a creative’s personhood, even when it pays to make ourselves the product. There must be some way to reject that paradigm and still make a living.

Maybe it’ll work, maybe it will not. Maybe I’ll never be a popular enough writer for that to matter. Who knows? Until then, I shall endeavor to walk this very fine line.

Thanks for reading all that as I try and fumble my way through my very complicated feelings about it all.

Oh, and just as a final marketing push (look at me go!), if anyone is coming up to Can*Con in Ottawa on the 17th-19th of this month, I will be there, and I’d absolutely love it if you come say hi! Alright, this was a long one. You deserve a sticker for making it to the end!

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When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. Her next novel The Lioness of Shara Mountain releases early 2026.