Is The Twitter Purchase Bad For Indie Authors?

A reader emailed to ask if I thought that Elon Musk taking over Twitter would be bad for indie authors.

I don’t think it will really matter for authors one way or another. Of the social media platforms, Twitter is generally the worst at selling books. Twitter as an ad platform is very ineffective. If you’re going to spend money on ads, you’ll get a lot better results using Facebook, Amazon Ads, and Bookbub (not necessarily in that order – it varies by book and platform) or email promo sites like Freebooksy and BargainBooksy. In fact, one of the interesting details that came out of the buyout was that by 2016, Twitter was in serious danger of going out of business, but the 2016 US presidential election suddenly drove massive new interest to the platform.

If you curate Twitter carefully, it can be a good source of news and information. If you misstep on Twitter, you can accidentally summon an angry mob of crazy people that will try to destroy your life. This really doesn’t seem like a good risk/reward ratio.

I’ve had a Twitter account since like 2011, but I only use it infrequently, mostly to post links to my website. Which isn’t the most effective way to use Twitter. If you want a lot of engagement, you have to use it a lot, like dozens of tweets a day, and I have neither the time nor the actual interest to do that.

This sounds like I don’t like Twitter – I don’t, generally – but I concede that Twitter can be a useful tool in a variety of circumstances. It’s just not a very useful tool for selling books the way that the other social platforms can be.

At a bigger level, is Twitter becoming a private company a good thing or a bad thing?

I don’t really know. Having a company go private isn’t inherently better or worse than a publicly traded one, it just depends on the circumstances. The downside of a publicly traded company is that it is basically enslaved to the quarterly filings and reports, and quality (and sometimes legal compliance) goes out the window in pursuit of a good quarter. I’ve used Dell computers both personally and professionally for 25 years, and I’m typing this post on one right now. After Dell went private in 2013, I noticed that the overall quality of Dell PCs and laptops went up by quite a bit. A privately held company is sometimes free to do things and achieve things that a publicly traded one cannot.

The flip side, of course, is that a privately held company can concentrate a lot of power into one individual, and if that individual isn’t up to the task, that can be the end of the company.

So maybe Mr. Musk and his staff will improve Twitter, or maybe they won’t. Time will tell. Based on my negative opinion of Twitter, I think maybe it would be a net gain for the cause of civilization if Mr. Musk totally destroyed Twitter, but even a “less bad” Twitter would be an improvement.

It is interesting that for the last six years or so there have been chin-tugging articles saying Something Must Be Done about Big Tech, and various political leaders have made speeches declaiming that Something Must Be Done about Big Tech. Except it turned out that maybe Big Tech would destroy itself. Facebook seems to have made a big bet on the Metaverse only to lose, and maybe Twitter will totally unravel. I suppose in the end, even the mightiest empires are finally undone by the own hubris and incompetence.

Also, I freely admit that like half of the reason I wrote this post was because I wanted an excuse to do a Photoshop of the Twitter logo on fire. 🙂

-JM