TikTok Drama and Me

I have made a somewhat conscious decision to keep my nose out of the random chaos and drama that crops up among the “booktok” community–TikTok creators who focus, primarily or exclusively, on discussions related to writing, reading, and books. The biggest reason for this decision is a lot of times, I don’t find this drama until days later and then I’m just late to the party. Other times, whatever I have to say has been said–and said and said and said–until anything I might be able to contribute will be lost to the din.

But I still have thoughts.

So, I’m bringing these thoughts here.

I have struggled with content ideas for this blog, and this seems like a good source for finding some of those ideas.

I will also be scrubbing this blog, getting rid of old posts that don’t really fit the overall mission. Hopefully, I can start training the bots to find me based on what I’m really sharing.

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Greetings and salutations!

Hello.

Let me begin by introducing myself and what I’m doing here. I am award-winning*, bestselling* author D. Gabrielle Jensen and I am a flaming disaster when it comes to blogging. I forget to keep up with it, I don’t follow a theme, I don’t tell people it exists.

But we’re going to give it another go.

I have another blog on Patreon and ultimately, in a world of perfect algorithms and SEO and discoverability, I would like all traffic to end up there. But that’s not the world we live in. Patreon, itself, does not have a discover feature; you have to go there knowing what you’re looking for. To an extent. You can search for “writers” and it will spit back all creators who consider themselves writers but you then have to visit each one individually – frankly, I think it’s more than the average consumer wants to deal with.

In the past, however, I have gotten a fair amount of traffic on WordPress, organically. Meaning that random ass people find me just because of my keen knack for tagging posts. I hope that this new interface works the same way and I can maybe get some organic traffic here.

WordPress is also less salty about directing traffic off-site. With each passing day, Facebook and Instagram are getting stickier and stickier about suppressing posts with links to external sites. They want that ad revenue for themselves.

Case in point: I have an app on my phone called Mistplay. You play games for points and then you can use those points to get gift cards. It’s pretty awesome. But! You can’t share your referral link to Mistplay on Facebook. Not even in a private message. It gets kicked back with a message that it violates community standards.

Why?

Because it’s a lot of the same games you can play on Facebook. Words With Friends, Coin Master, Bingo Blitz, a variety of slots games, a variety of solitaire card games, all of which are also connected to Facebook. So if you play through Facebook, they get a cut of the ad revenue. If you play through Mistplay, THEY get that cut.

It’s logical from a business standpoint but from a user standpoint, it kind of sucks.

Also, discoverability on Facebook is a bit of a mess. Instagram’s decent but with the same algorithm insanity. TikTok is actually working pretty well for me but I’m struggling to find enough content to keep it going. So, we’re going to see what we can do about making this work. Maybe I can get out in front of people this way.

* Click here for more information.