I want to do the work of falling in love. (Misshelved #14)

Despite my best efforts, I am cursed by the book world’s algorithm. How do I break it?

Excerpts from “What Do You Think You’re Doing?” a purposefully ugly digital zine by Kaiser Caimo. Read the full zine over on Gumroad.

You are a book lover. You post content about books online. That is how we talk now: content. It’s all content, whether it’s a thousand-word essay about writing sent out in a newsletter, a photo of a new book posted on Instagram, a two-minute TikTok of book recommendations, or whatever we call Tweets these days. (It cannot be Xeets. Like the Neopet Xweetok? Surely not.) 

You are a—well, let’s not say content creator. Here. Choose your identity. You are a BookTokker. A Bookstagrammer. An old-fashioned book blogger. An aspiring author. A published author.

Regardless of the identity you choose, you must feed the algorithm. Like George, the ghost who supposedly haunts Disney World’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, the algorithm is a phantom on the stage of social media, and it must be acknowledged, lest your content/posts/essays go unnoticed. You don’t want to be cursed. 

To avoid George’s curse, you say hello to George when you board his ride.

To avoid the algorithm’s curse, you perform.

Creating content online and interacting with the people who consume your content doesn’t always feel like a performance. As comedian and Dimension 20 dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan once said, “People are like gems. They have facets to them, and some of them only get exposed within certain relationships.” Most people belong to multiple online communities where, for better or worse, we reveal (and conceal) different sides of ourselves. Different interests. Different aspects of our identities. Different aspirations.

But it’s not the communities we perform for first—it’s the algorithm. If we don’t perform for the algorithm, we won’t reach our communities.

Performing for the algorithm and keeping your performance in mind as you create content can be … exhausting. It can reshape who you are and how you view everything. It can affect your mental health. It can affect what you create.

Take, for instance, the so-called “literary It Girls” recently highlighted in Nylon by journalist Sophia June. Among the many authors June profiles in her piece is Allie Rowbottom, who paid out of pocket for publicity and threw lavish parties for both the hardcover and paperback releases of her novel, Aesthetica. “Held at the Georgia Room and photographed by famed nightlife photographer the Cobrasnake, the [hardcover] party was hosted by Forever Magazine . . . It included pay-by-donation Botox and a video appearance by Caroline Calloway,” while the paperback party featured “a reading by the actress Tommy Dorfman.” Rowbottom, along with other It Girls included in June’s article, justified their extravagant marketing campaigns and social media posts by citing reasons like relatability and creativity. But Rowbottom knew that she wanted an elaborate marketing campaign that would pair with her novel. 

She wanted events that would generate the perfect social media posts to pair with her book.

This is not a phenomenon unique to young women. It is not even a new phenomenon. A recent two-part episode of the popular Behind the Bastards podcast explored the failures of Going Infinite, a recent biography of crypto grifter Sam Bankman-Fried written by bestselling author Michael Lewis. The book is bad, both poorly researched and poorly written, partially because Lewis falls prey to Bankman-Fried’s charisma—and partially because Lewis can’t seem to help but envision how the biography will be adapted for the big screen. Instead of writing a book that works as a book, he creates a pitch for a biopic, a piece of writing that’s digestible and shareable by a demographic of directors and celebrities, rather than appealing and worthwhile for readers. 

In other words, Lewis was thinking too much about how he would promote his book before he’d even finished writing it.

Author Naomi Klein has also observed how social media can cause identity to splinter, because she saw it happen to the students in her college classes, who felt the need to self-brand in order to succeed. In her book Doppelganger, Klein writes:

My students may not have real live doubles making chaos for them, but they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. As part of this performance, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of themselves onto others (the unenlightened, the problematic, the deplorable, the “not me” that sharpens the borders of the “me”). At its worst, this manifests in the sort of online pile-on and shaming culture that shatters lives and makes all of our selves feel so precarious. This triad—of partitioning, performing, and projecting—is fast becoming a universal form of doppelganging, generating a figure who is not exactly us but whom others nonetheless perceive as us. At best, a digital doppelganger can deliver everything our culture trains us to want: fame, adulation, riches. But it’s a precarious kind of wish fulfillment, one that can be blown up with a single bad take or post. One that can easily become a kind of addiction.

In 2024, it is not enough to create something you are proud of, to the highest level that you can personally create, if your creation does not perform digitally. And in order for something to perform digitally, you must feed the algorithm.

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When Threads and Bluesky first launched, I joined them, despite having abandoned Twitter in 2020. This was mostly to save my username—I don’t think it’s likely, but I don’t fancy somebody pretending to be me—but some friends also insisted that the dynamic on these apps was different. It feels like early Twitter, they said.

And it does. For weeks, I set a 5-minute timer on each app, logging in and doing a little scroll. I saw the same arguments from early Twitter resurfacing again and again and again. No, authors are not in control of typos. Yes, it is a conflict of interest for reviewers to be paid directly by authors or publishers. Who cares what genre you read as long as you are reading? No, that isn’t how the industry works. No, that isn’t how the industry works. No, that isn’t how the industry works. Who are you even getting your information from? I’m outraged. I need to correct that person. I need to engage. I need to educate in spaces where 240 characters simply aren’t enough to describe the history and dynamics of an entire industry.

In a blog post from 2013, the brand consulting and communication company Callies & Schewe described the onslaught of nontent within the context of digital marketing. But the landscape has shifted since then. All the internet’s become a stage, and all its users merely players. Now everybody has become a brand. We are constantly performing, sharing our thoughts, churning out post after post after post as we seek the algorithm’s approval and rewards. Perhaps we want somebody to notice our book recommendation, or perhaps we are planning ahead, offering slow crumbs of engagement in the hope of receiving the “right” response when we finally have a big announcement to make. 

Nontent is meant to make the algorithm love you. It is meant to make people remember your digital mask. It is not meant to inform, educate, tell a story, recommend a book, or even to have fun. We fire off thoughts into the void, wanting a like, a response, or even an argument—not to connect with other people, but to keep the algorithm fed. 

On the eve of my 31st birthday, I archived everything I’d posted on Instagram and started over. I’m not the only one who has done this: New York Times bestselling author Courtney Summere has archived her entire feed more than once and changes her website layout even more frequently. 

I really like both Summers and her content. In an environment where many authors attempt to keep readers engaged by posting as much as they can about everything they think is relevant, Summers posts highly stylized images that connect directly to her books, accompanied by thoughtful captions, or explorations of things she reads about. These posts often pair with long-form essays she sends out in her newsletter. She breaks these habits only to celebrate the release of her friends’ books.

To some extent, Summers is performing; she has a brand. She does not share details of her personal life on the internet in the way that, say, New York Times bestselling author Sona Charaipotra does—but then, Charaipotra is also a senior editor at Parents, and sharing her personal life supports her professional life and brand in a way that would not suit Summers. The focus of Summers’ online performance is her books and the things she loves, and you don’t get to know her except for rare instances when she peels back her mask in an essay. Even then, a different mask is present; Summers knows she is writing to an audience.

Charaipotra and Summers are both authors, a role in which their publishers expect them to maintain public images, regardless of whether that’s a fair expectation to foist upon authors. But I am a bookseller. Once, I was a blogger. I write to share books I love and nuanced thoughts about the industry I love. One day, I may be an author. Right now, I’m not. 

Yet the compulsion to churn out content and brand myself lingers. If I’m not sharing every book I read with my social media following, am I really online? If those books don’t form a cohesive brand, are they worth reading? What books get the most engagement? Should I be posting about frontlist, backlist, or both? Should I be posting daily? What does the algorithm want? If I plan to pursue becoming an author, should I restructure how I post slowly to build that audience? What about making content that’s easier to share? I’m not happy with this photo I took, but I haven’t posted in a few days—

I have an anxiety disorder. It is entirely possible that most people don’t think this way about their content, but I don’t think I’m the only one who frets about the performance of their digital presence or the work they share in this digital social space, despite knowing that they shouldn’t. Take how Maggie Smith feels about one of her viral poems: “If I had any idea how many people were going to read ‘Good Bones,’ I never would have finished it. I’d still be sitting in that Starbucks trying to make it better.” 

Author R.F. Kuang also touched on the publishing industry’s performative social media behavior in a podcast with Time. “We are in this unique moment where there’s this writing ecosystem that largely exists on social media where everyone is advertising their wins all the time,” she said. “There’s a standard script for all of these success markers and when you see these flying in your face, being waved by writers you know, it sucks, and it hurts.”

The internet is a stage, but I never fancied myself a player, and finding myself an “influencer” (whatever that means these days) in the bookish community is a responsibility I take seriously. I think critically about my content and its long-term ramifications. I believe in nuance and responsibility and activism, and that means it takes me longer than most people to respond to issues happening within the community—as if, somehow, I am responsible for every issue, as if I can fix everything if I alone say the right thing. The anxiety makes my body tense, which makes my chronic pain flare up, leaving my back in knots and my jaw aching. 

What I believe in my core is that all this doesn’t matter as much as I feel like it matters. Anxiety wants social media to matter more than it does. Anxiety wants me to be wound up about all of this. But—but it doesn’t matter. Or, at least, it doesn’t have to. Not to me. If I have learned anything from nearly a decade inside my bookstore, it is that the digital world is often an illusion of reality. 

And despite the times that it has been or is real, we are in a moment when social media is changing. 

Something in me needs to change, too.

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On a quiet Sunday morning in December, I send a text to Courtney Summers, who has been gradually conned into thinking I am cool enough to swap numbers with.

As I wait for her response, I catch up on the newsletters in my inbox. Many of the subject lines I see align with the swirling posts I see online; and those newsletters without such eye-catching headlines share links to pieces or explore their creators’ thoughts about the same ideas. As I’m reading author Susan Dennard’s essay on finding more creative fulfillment through leaving social media, a friend texts me a link to a video about how platforms like TikTok are social media spaces shared between reviewers and writers, and then I receive an Instagram message from an author friend I thanked for resharing my essay about how Twitter destroyed YA: “lol i was like LET’S TALK ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA KILLING AUTHORS”

In her newsletter recommending gifts for the 2023 holiday season, New York Times bestselling author Alix E. Harrow—who wrote one of my five favorite books of 2023, the Appalachian gothic horror slash romantic fantasy, Starling House—discussed author brands, and how hard it is for her to develop and maintain one, and where it overlaps with her reading habits. She wrote:

i was talking to a writing friend a couple of weeks ago, and he thanked me very sincerely for being—or making myself—“something like the ideal reader for pretty much anything you read.” and—well. i like that.

i like the way it frames reading as skilled labor rather than pure leisure. i like the implication that you, the Ideal Reader, are not a sleek ambush predator who waits for the Ideal Book to stroll into your mouth—but one of those sweaty, ignominious endurance hunters, who has to chase it down. that reading well is an exercise in sustained curiosity, and curiosity is work.

it’s work to approach a book as a collusion of intentional aesthetic decisions, rather than a consumable product engineered solely to please you; to ask why, from what angle, to what end, for who, against what; to keep your disbelief generously suspended and your arms uncrossed; to indulge—knowingly, but not condescendingly—in the conceits of the genre; to resist the paranoid, destructive reading that reduces every work to a moral positive or negative; to let yourself be surprised by the twist; to worry less about what your reactions to a book say about you and more about what the book is saying to you; to listen, to feel, to think, to empathize, to find your way in—idk. it’s work, to fall in love.

and of course that work—the good and honest work of reading—suffers under the weight of social media and corporate publishing (what doesn’t!). of course it gets swallowed up in the endless churn of money-making and content-making and identity-making, and of course what gets spat back out often looks more like a review for a toaster on amazon than like, a human talking about a book. of course it encourages a consistent and legible brand (barf!) over everything else; algorithms always do.

It’s work, to fall in love.

My email pings. Summers carved out time immediately to answer my questions—we are in a deep mutual admiration society; she is, objectively, the cooler member—and she responds by introducing me to Seth Godin’s smallest viable audience strategy, which she describes as “making meaningful connections with and holding the quality of your work accountable to the people that it’s actually for.

“Publishing has increasingly lost sight of this in the advent of game-changing social media platforms like Tiktok, so instead of looking for a book’s specific audience on Tiktok, they want every book to be A Tiktok Book. I think that puts untold pressure on authors—aspiring and otherwise—to become something for everyone, which is, ultimately, a losing game.”

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Since I already texted Summers about how she creates content, I say “fuck it” out loud and message two of my favorite Bookstagrammers: Deedi and Tavi. 

Deedi is a powerhouse of a digital presence in the literary fiction space. If I ever recommend you a litfic book, it’s because Deedi has given it her stamp of approval. (She reads more broadly than that and has a soft spot for Maas-style romantasy, but since I don’t read literary fiction like she does, she’s my first call when I need to know if a book is good.) Deedi is a content marketer by day, but I know her better as a book reviewer who runs a digital Booker of the Month club and somehow gets invited to all the chicest literary parties. 

A combination of work rules—“I was working for a company regulated by the SEC with very strict marketing laws”—and respect for the privacy of her social media-free friends and family have trained Deedi not to share much about her personal life on her Bookstagram. (She has a separate, private personal account.) She used to spend hours preparing posts, but in 2024, her goal is to move away from “the hamster wheel of book reviews.” Instead, she is keeping a running list of post ideas and meme inspiration for when she’s not sure what to post, and focusing on her deep desire to read more and more. “For me, TBRs snowball because the more you read, the more books you want to read,” Deedi tells me over email. ”That lends itself to talking about it online with others who feel similarly, or else I might explode in my solitude.”

As a content manager in her day-to-day life, Deedi is acutely aware of how “everyone has a brand, whether they’ve built it on purpose or not. . . I think it’s impossible not to let personal performance come into play when you’re on the internet, whether your account is big and public or small and private. To me, it’s more about whether you are showing a side of you that is true or not.” Her focus is on community content. “If I don’t think what I’m posting will make someone’s day brighter or their worldview wider or their sense of bookish community greater, I will probably choose not to post it. Because at that point, it’s all about me, and then tips toward that fabricated self.”

Meanwhile, everybody in Romancelandia knows Tavi. I first met her in August at SteamyLitCon, where she amassed a crowd to rival some of the published authors just by walking into a room. She’s hard to miss: Her signature bright pink hair means she pops wherever she goes. Though I follow her on Instagram, she’s better known for her TikTok, where she’s amassed over a million likes. 

Tavi’s relationship with social media is as far away from my own as I can imagine. She started posting years ago as an aspiring author, working first on a murder mystery novel, then a YA dystopian, then a work of literary fiction about a rape survivor; she now plans to release her debut romance novel in 2024. Online, however, she now focuses more on the books she loves and, increasingly, sharing her personal life. 

“I call my social media my Life Reel, not the highlight reel,”  says Tavi to me over email. “I want to look back on old posts and see exactly what I was going through. I didn’t want to see pretending. I’ve always shared a lot, but then 2020 started and I began to share it all, because I didn’t see anyone else going through what I was, and I wanted to help other people. Now I know that I have. And for that reason alone, I feel like I’ll keep doing it in some aspect.”

Tavi and I have different goals and different histories with our social media. Tavi bares her life and problems in a way that would leave me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t make it a wrong way to interact with social media. She takes pride in the connections she offers her followers. I entered the digital space at age 13 because I needed a space to talk about books I loved. When I accidentally found a following, I discovered the external pressure to grow and the internal pressure for a high standard to be anxiety inducing, even as I continued to love writing and talking about books. I was too young to talk about personal things safely, and by the time I was old enough to share them, I’d been chewed out on Twitter more than once. Share novels I’m working on? Admit to bad days? Absolutely not.

Tavi, on the other hand, set out to cultivate an audience and finds joy in exposing the hard parts and the connections she finds by doing so. Much like Deedi, Tavi’s focus is on the bookish community that flocks around her. “It’s all positive for me, personally,” she says. 

Honestly, I’m jealous. How can I create a space I feel is all positive for me?

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There’s a lot of stuff on the internet. Some of that stuff is great. Some of it is important. It’s Hank Green making cancer socks, or the work of Palestinian journalists, or rallies against book bans. It’s book recommendations and celebrations of the writers we love. 

Yet so much more stuff is generic content, regurgitated opinions and recycled information in an inescapable algorithmic swirl. Even more stuff is nontent, cotton candy dipped in water, dissolving with nothing to show for its creation but a blip of likes in binary code. As the social media landscape fragments, there’s more of everything and more of nothing.

What does this fragmentation accomplish? What does all this content do? What are the goals of its creators?

As Nilay Patel wrote for The Verge, “Fragmentation might be a good thing — it also means there’s an opportunity to try new, bigger, more interesting things, instead of trying to shove everything into the same box.”

What do I want to do?

Writing for Nylon, journalist Sophia June noted that Aesthetica author Allie Rowbottom “knew she wanted there to be a performance aspect to [her novel’s] marketing because of its subject matter.” Yet according to Circana’s BookScan program, which tracks book sales data, Rowbottom’s books have sold just over 2,000 copies in hardcover and paperback combined. Compared to Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, who are also discussed in the piece and whose books have sold tens of thousands of copies, the difference of success in a purely financial sense is … staggering. Creating buzz for the sake of buzz doesn’t sell books.

It can be easy to dismiss June’s article as a predictable uplifting of young white women with too much disposable income and too little interest in sustainable writing careers. But I don’t disagree with all of their observations. Of the writers June features, the one who sticks with me is Bad Thoughts author Nada Alic. Alic has sold roughly the same number of copies as Rowbottom, but rather than throwing lavish book parties, Alic created a short film about her book to act as a trailer. When June asked her about this, Alic said, “There are no rules, no one knows anything, so it’s important to get creative, try new things, and not take yourself too seriously.”

There are no rules. No one knows anything. It’s important to get creative. It’s important to try new things and not take yourself too seriously.

I think about writing these words out on a sticky note to put on my computer. Instead, I delete Bluesky and Threads from my phone. Maybe I will redownload them to share links to essays and big announcements and then delete them again, treating them as a sort of digital bulletin board of where I am and where you can find me. Or maybe I won’t. Social media is splintering, and if you want to read me, you know where to find me. I am not one of the many “chasing power” who turn to social media; I am not an influential figure with something important to say. I just like a place to put my thoughts and, occasionally, recommend books. These days, I set a timer on my Instagram account to minimize the time I spend on the only social media app I still use. 

I realize that I, in every piece of my soul, prefer long-form content to social media. I write this essay. I wonder what this essay is really about.

In the same interview where Maggie Smith talks about her poem “Good Bones,” she also discusses her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which people describe as a divorce memoir, even though it isn’t. It’s impossible for Smith to distill all the aspects of her life that she pours into the memoir into an easy pitch. She tells interviewer and author Isaac Fitzgerald that “if you have an elevator pitch for your adult life, you’re living too small.”  

Pitches are useful when you’re selling a book, but I don’t want to distill myself into consumable bite-sized chunks. I want to stretch out, to speak full thoughts in all their complexity and nuance. I only want to share those thoughts that I deem public and keep the rest of my life to myself. I want to step away from nontent designed to make algorithms remember me and bury myself into big, messy projects that may never see the light of day, for the simple joy of creating something. I want to read. As author Julie Falatko wrote, “Now I’m online for so many of my waking hours. And how do I change it back, so I dream of books again?”

In her emails with me, Summers inadvertently slams the performance metaphor she didn’t know I had written in the early drafts of this essay. She says, “I try not to think of social media as a stage on which to perform the personal or to perform authenticity, but as a place where I am sharing a piece of myself that comprises a greater whole—and therefore is personal and authentic, regardless of aesthetic curation. This is who I am when I am here, which is different from who I am when I am with family, which is different from who I am when I am with friends. And whatever piece of themselves someone wants to define their online space by is up to them, and is not more or less performative or authentic than my own. It’s very healthy to establish those boundaries and no one is entitled to what you’re not willing to share—coming out under the circumstances I did really reinforced that perspective. What you see is what I give you. Whether or not that is received in good faith depends on who is engaging.”

I think, ultimately, she’s right. The internet is not a stage; I am not a player. Or, at least, if I am, I am performing the way that my friend Katie refers to as “digital drag,” with curation and intention toward the mask I am wearing. I am not a content creator. I am a community member. I am a writer. I want to do the work of falling in love, both with what other people create and what I create, from books to essays to art to short-form observations to whatever the internet shrinks down and calls content.

In her December Diarist newsletter, my author friend Miranda Dubner asks, “What if I had fun putting one word in front of another again? What if it was wonderful?”

Having fun creating—be it books, or essays, or a post recommending books that match the latest Dimension 20 campaign—can seem revolutionary. Maybe, to some of you reading this, it doesn’t. But if the newsletters that hit my inbox and the frenetic energy from my friends are anything to go by, the idea of creating what you want to create on the timeline you want to create it is wild. Inconceivable! Maybe my perception is shaped by knowing too many people bogged down by their publishers’ expectations that they be constantly promoting, or knowing too many people with 10,000 so-called side hustles that they need to do in order to make money or feed some part of their creative soul (or both), or just by knowing too many people who feel the pressure of the lingering algorithm. 

If the internet must call anything we create content, then I want to lean into slow content, meticulously crafted for the community that wants to engage with it. I want to ignore the algorithm. I want to be present. I want to take pride in what I create. I want to take my time writing. I want to take my time composing plant-laden book photos and finding the right words for the books I have read. I want to take my time reading. I want to read and write weird things, niche things, strange things. 

I want to write what I want to write. 

And I will.

And it will be wonderful.