You Don't Have to Quit Instagram + link love

You just have to stop following its rules

Many of us (based on my readership statistics) experienced the jarring shift of the late-aughts toward “platform building.” We may have begun our careers in writing or another kind of art-making in the years of “Make good art and it will rise to the top,” but in our mid to late twenties, early thirties, that shifted and quickly.

We didn’t have time to evaluate either the legitimacy or the longevity of the demand to build a platform before putting our art into the world in a more permanent way. Suddenly, the opportunity to constantly put work in front of an audience was everywhere. We didn’t have to wait the two+ years of writing, editing, producing, and finally releasing a book. We could have a thought and share it on Instagram in two seconds. It was magical. It was electrifying.

My friend

Emily P. Freeman

wrote this week that

Publishing is a business and it always will be (this includes hybrid publishers, Christian publishers, and self-publishing, too.) It’s all business and you get to decide if that’s the business you want in. If it is, then learn the rules and work hard not to despise them (one of the rules will be that a publisher wants to know you already have people listening to you who would potentially buy your book when the time comes—a platform.) This includes serving readers first, finding creative ways to talk to them, and being on your own team. If all of that sounds too self-promotion-y, then maybe traditional publishing isn’t the road for you.

The sentence I want to highlight is that “You get to decide if it’s the business you want to be in…learn the rules and work hard to not despise them.”¹

Listen, I’ve spent my fair share of the past decade and a half despising the rules even as I was learning them (even as publishers themselves were learning them as they made them!), so I’m not going to tell you to not feel the pain of those rules. They hurt, they’re predisposed to benefit certain kinds of people with certain kinds of power or advantage. If you’re not a white, attractive, financially stable or entrepreneurial type alpha male who enjoys/is good at public speaking, or a white, attractive, thin, marketable or able to market female who easily networks, the odds go way down on your ability to build a platform based upon your writing alone. Thems are the breaks and thems are the rules.

Every time a new conference is announced or group of writers joins together for an event, I look over the faces included. I’m looking for diversity not for diversity’s sake, but because it is a diagnosis of sorts: who gets ahead? who gets asked? who is included in this group? who is part of this network? If they all look similar or have similar marketability, it doesn’t say anything about the individuals² but it does say a lot about the rules.

It is simply easier to play by the rules when we fit the definition of who the rules most benefit. This is capitalism 101, I’m not saying anything new.

Okay, enter Instagram.

Let’s for a minute think of rule not as a bar to reach but as a “the normal and customary state of things,” or another definition, “used for measuring.” Let’s think of rule as the mean or average of something. It’s just what it is, like twelve inches on a ruler. It’s not a judgement of things, it’s just a fact of things. Okay?

Instagram takes all those qualities I named above about who benefits in these systems, and puts them front and center. Words are, very literally, put beneath the image, they are secondary to the visual image of whatever the wordsmith wants to use to draw attention to the words. On Instagram, this might be the writer’s face or their house or an image with text from the caption on it or a clip of them speaking or an image of their kids or their office. What is marketable is the image, not the words. The words are secondary to the image of the white, attractive, financially stable or entrepreneurial type alpha male who enjoys/is good at public speaking, or the white, attractive, thin, marketable or able to market female who easily networks.

These are facts. Ask anyone who doesn’t fit the bill of those qualities above if they feel it. And if you don’t feel it yourself, chances are you fit within one of those categories above and are benefiting from it.

Anyone who doesn’t fit those definitions and builds a large (50k+) platform on Instagram is the exception, not the rule.

And for the past decade and a half, the best most of us could do is simply play by those rules hoping eventually we’d catch our break.³

Okay, here’s what I want to say: the break isn’t coming for you. It’s just not. You can play by the rules of publishing and build a loyal audience base but it’s not going to be on visual/audio mediums. It’s going to be with words. The ones who get ahead quickly on platforms like Instagram are using their other qualities (named above) to get ahead on that platform because they can and because that’s who the platform rewards. And we cannot fault them that, really. It’s genetic or it’s who they know at a particular moment in time or it’s something else.

But here’s what I want to say to you: you don’t have to either go all in on a platform that wasn’t made for you as a writer or just quit Instagram altogether. It’s not a choice between two extremes. You have agency here and can choose to say to publishers, “Listen, I’m going to do my best to find my readers using my words, and not jump through hoops that weren’t made for me. I am not the exception to the rule and I can’t hit those rules because my skin isn’t that color or my body doesn’t look like that or the thought of self-promotion makes me want to crawl into myself and never come out. So instead of trying to turn myself into something else, I’m just going to write, and you can look at my Instagram if you want, but just know that’s not where I’m putting my best work or best energy. If you want to know who I am and what kind of work I’m producing, look at my [past work, articles, substack, etc.] and if you want to see who I’m reaching, look at those numbers. If you want to see pics of my kids or a piece of art I like or a funny moment I had the other day, check out my Instagram.”

I’m seeing all kind of writers quit Instagram for various reasons, and that’s their prerogative, they can do that. But nine times out of ten it’s because they couldn’t keep up with a medium that wasn’t made for them as wordsmiths, and so they find themselves dealing with envy or discouragement or burnout or whatever. It easier to quit than it is to simply say, “This isn’t the best tool for my work but I can still use it for whatever I want it for.” I don’t use a hammer in my everyday work but I’m sure as heck glad for one when I need one. My hammer wasn’t made for me either, it was made for a bigger and stronger hand, but it works for what I need or want it for and I don’t begrudge it for not being perfect for me.

Here’s my challenge to you writers in particular: Opt out of the hoops and Instagram will become a more enjoyable place again. Give the algorithm the bird and post stupid captions and badly framed images. You will not add followers there (I’ve had the same number (or less!) of followers on Instagram for three years, ever since I stopped playing their game) but you don’t need to add followers there. Followers are not readers and if you are a writer, you want readers. Followers don’t buy books, readers do! So give the people what they want: your words. And stop fretting about what Instagram wants because it is an impossible thing to hack and only the exception do.

You aren’t the exception. You are the rule.

And now that you know that, get your butt in your chair and write for goodness sake. The world needs your words more than they need your aesthetic or lipstick or pithy point made in less than ten seconds. If you feel like offering any of the above, go for it, but not because you’re building a platform, just because you feel like it.⁴

This piece from

Elise Loehnen

felt like reading my mail: “How many of us judge women who wear makeup, or have disdain for women who “care what people think”? (I’ve judged. I’ve felt disdain. I’ve felt worried about being judged too, and a bit like a traitor when I try to look my best.)”

Oooof, I’ve been told this too. From

Andrea Gibson

“It’s not appropriate to ask someone what makes them cry twenty minutes after you’ve met,” she said, laughing at the social flaws that have made my life what it is. Do I even know how to ask someone what they think about the weather if it’s not the weather of their heart?

This piece is aching and lovely and terrible and I read it three times. From

Mary Roblyn

Twist and Shout, I Told My Dying Husband.

Here’s a piece from

Sara Billups

titled In God We Trump: “If we are into Jesus but not into Christian culture, but we live in America in an election year with the polls looking pre-tty good for Donald John Trump, what are we supposed to do? I could think of only three possibilities a reasonable person could take as a response to “the Trumpifcation of the Church” illustrated in these two articles, and countless others.”

And finally, here’s a piece from

Agents and Books

on why writers shouldn’t shoot for the bestseller lists.

Are we listening to anything except the TWO new Taylor Albums? I didn’t think so.

I am in a total reading slump right now. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m reading a ton, three books a week. But I seem to be picking some real duds—or at least duds for me. I finished Listen for the Lie, Bluebird, First Lie Wins, and One Puzzling Afternoon recently and they were all a bit meh for me. I started How High We Go in the Dark last night, though, and it felt promising. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, any recommendations?

I was mesmerized by this gorgeous short film on rewilding a family forest.

All the TWs for this one (sex, language, mental health crises), but while Nate has been gone I watched Fleishman is in Trouble and I can’t remember a show that made me cry as much as this one did. If you’re in your midlife and married and can handle those triggers above, it was a long and beautiful lament.

Have you preordered my latest book? The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor?

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1. I also love that Emily said, “Serve your readers first,” because she gets it. It’s not about followers, it’s about readers.

2. I’m sure they’re all very nice, very legitimate, and very hardworking individuals.

3. To be clear, I actually don’t think a lot of publishers pushed these rules on us. I think we heard “numbers” or “platform” and automatically applied it to whatever platform was the hot one at that moment. Ultimately though, it’s in the best interest of publishers to want the platform to be mostly made up of readers and I think they’re starting to get more specific about this. Shoutout to Brazos and

Katelyn Beaty

for championing this way of thinking about platform.

4. My personal experience since I started using Instagram instead of being used by it is that my “followers” have shrunk but my readers have grown. I also scroll SO much less and when I do, I’m looking for visual beauty (and sharing it almost every Saturday on “Beauty I saved this week). I'm posting about The Understory when and if I feel like it and not expecting anything to even bump my numbers up at all. It’s akin to a piece of paper I’m stapling to an electric pole, that noticeable. In other words, probably not very noticeable or memorable. I rarely post links to my Substack from Instagram because no one clicks on them and more and more I’m convinced social media doesn’t sell books. I have a very detached relationship with the app anymore, very indifferent, and I’m a healthier writer than I’ve been in a long time because of it.