Deleting Delusions

“Ultimately, my Instagram and Pinterest presence did far less to boost sales of my latest book than a single essay I wrote for The New York Times or a single message I sent out to my mailing list. But my publisher’s marketing and publicity team was so busy ordering interns to craft tiny squares of digital clip art for both platforms that they neither leveraged that mailing list nor helped place that essay. I did both on my own. Because for me, succeeding as a writer has had nothing to do with Instagram or Pinterest and everything to do with, well, writing.”

There were a lot of different bits that I could've pulled out of this piece to use for the quote, but this is the one I keep coming back to and thinking about since it echoes something I hear others saying a lot: social media is not helping them sell whatever it is they're selling. It doesn't matter if they are trying to get subscriptions to a newsletter, sell knitting patterns they've designed, or sell artwork they're creating. This piece also reminded me a lot of the book The Quiet Before by Gal Beckerman, since the author here points out that social media isn't helping causes as much as we might like to think.