I Don't Dance

My Journey Into the World of TikTok Writers

Photo by Amanda Vick on Unsplash

I honestly thought TikTok was just trendy dancing. I’m a millennial who’s not too savvy on social media. And honestly, I just didn’t get it. I still don’t. The hardest part of TikTok for me, right now in this moment, is that I’m not a huge fan. I don’t get why people want to scroll through it, but they do.

I’m using it as a tool. A marketing tool to get my newsletter out into the world, and maybe some books if I can’t get them published. I hope I can. Because this whole marketing thing is for the birds.

I’m not trendy. Never have been. I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo. It’s not surprising really. A lot of people who write are. It’s probably what draws us inward to some extent. But the reality is that there have never been so many powerful platforms that can get you in front of an audience as there are now.

Before, it was only the gatekeepers of the big publishing houses who could let you through. If they said no, and chances are they would, then your shot at writing professionally was nil. So while it’s not my favorite thing (cue world’s smallest violin playing), I have to give it a shot. After all, it might work.

A basic breakdown of the platform

Short form, fast paced, and trend driven videos.

I know, I know. It’s a pain in the ass to even think about as a writer. After all, aren’t we dedicated to the slow crafting of words that lead our readers on an incredible story that crescendo in one to twelve hours into reading? Well, that’s not TikTok folks. But the people who like to read are out there, hunting for recommendations, trying to discover new authors, and supporting indie publishing. It’s possible your readers are on there. Maybe a lot of them.

So here’s how it works:

You can record 15 second, 1 minute, or up to 3 minute long videos. You choose the length when you create a new video using the trusty plus icon in the app.

You can add sound, edit your video, add stickers, captions, a whole host of things to make your video unique. If you want a really clearcut simple breakdown of different ways to edit your videos, I used this article here. I think you’ll find it useful as well.

After you’re finished editing, you can describe your video and add hashtags. Now this is very important.

Hashtags are the way TikTok helps bring your video to audiences who like those topics. In the case of writers, the most popular hashtags are #booktok, #writersoftiktok, #«your genre»booktok, #books, etc. Always describe your video in the description field so people know what to expect, and always, always use hashtags.

Now if you’re familiar with Instagram hashtags and their algorithm, you’ll want to readjust your thinking here. On Instagram, the general consensus is the more hashtags the merrier. TikTok is different. You’ll want a few descriptive hashtags in there and that’s it. Most of the videos I looked at that had hundreds of thousands to millions of views had two or three.

Engagement on the platform is divided into several different interactions.

• Views

• Likes

• Comments

• Shares

• Saves

• Follows

• Messages

While views are extremely powerful and indicate how well your video is tapping into the algorithms themselves, the end goal is to obtain followers. If you go viral, but no one finds your account of value, then you haven’t really achieved much more than a popular video.

Likes are powerful in helping you get more views. TikTok does a good job of showing both popular and less popular videos, with the goal being that the platform won’t be overrun by a few top performing accounts. The little guys, the new creators, get love too. That’s great news for people like you and me, but I’ve noticed something on my own videos. The more likes, the more views, particularly if a video gets some interaction early on.

Comments allow users to interact with creators and other commenters. You can like and reply just like any other comment/chat feature, and you should! The more interaction on the platform, the better.

Shares show you how many times a user shared your video. What I found out this week, is that this feature is typically used to “stitch” or “duet” a video, or use the same sound from your video. (More about those features later).

Follows are visible in the profile section of the app. This indicates the most important metric: after users saw your video, how many of them liked it enough to follow your account?

Messages are the same as DM’s, a private messaging feature in the app that allows you to interact in a private setting.

Creating your TikTok account

If you don’t have one, you’ll have to make one. If you do have one and it’s a personal account, you may want to create a new one for your writing (unless of course you’ve got a bunch of followers and already know what you’re doing). That’s because TikTok is niche driven. You don’t want a whole lot of variety in the topics you post about because it will make your account less effective at getting views. If you really want to talk about wildly different topics, it’s best to make different accounts.

Now, something that I didn’t do at first, but am switching to now…

You’ll want to create a Business Account on TikTok. That’s because these types of accounts offer you analytics into your posts, and you’re going to need those as you refine a strategy for marketing your writing. If you’re like me and you set it up wrong at the outset, not to worry. Simply follow the below steps.

1. Navigate to Profile at the bottom right corner of your screen.

2. Tap the hamburger menu in the upper right corner to open Settings and privacy

3. Tap Account

4. Tap Switch to Business Account option

5. Tap Next to select the category for your business. I chose Personal Blog because it fits best, but I may update that in the future.

I haven’t looked into analytics yet, so expect that in next week’s newsletter.

Training the Algorithm

When you first start out, your Home is going to be totally random. This is the place where TikTok shows you videos that you’ll probably like, so right away you’ll want to go to the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner, and search using booktok, books, writersoftiktok. You’ll want to click on those videos and like the ones that appeal to you. This will tell TikTok that you enjoy reading. It only took me a few times of scrolling for the algorithm to pick up what I was here for, and the videos are almost exclusively writers, readers, and book reviews.

Create Your First Video

Just get started. If you don’t like what you post, you can always delete it later. I created an introduction (but late in the game) and pinned it so it will be the first video people see when they go to my account page. I just said my name, why I’m on TikTok, and what people could expect to see from me. It doesn’t have to be flashy ;)

Some Things I’m Noticing but Have No Hard Evidence For

Because you’re on this journey with me in very real time, there’s a lot of things I don’t know yet. But I have been looking at a few top trending accounts and I’ll tell you what I see.

1. A lot of books. That’s right. BookTok likes looking at bookshelves, seeing pretty covers, and cool up close shots of pages being flipped. It’s dorky, but I see the appeal. After all, I love books too.

2. Top 5 Recommendations. Books I Wish I Could Read For The First Time Again. Books That Ripped My Heart Out. The Most Disappointing Reads of 2022. And so on and so forth. They’re quick, always show the cover, and typically have captions and trendy music.

3. Songs. They’re a major part of TikTok trends, meaning the algorithm boosts videos based on whether or not users seemed to like watching videos with certain songs in them. When you create your first video, you can play around with the Add Sound button. It pops up in the middle of your video with a music note next to it, and allows you to search through song clips. If you scroll down a little, you’ll see a Playlist section with the option of selecting TikTok Viral. These give you the current top songs in order. I’m playing around with selecting those to see if it boosts my views. When I have hard data I’ll share it.

Using CapCut To Create Videos

While there are a lot of editing features in the TikTok app, it’s still limited. CapCut is an app that is much more feature rich, and allows you to integrate directly with TikTok. You can create your videos on your phone, edit them in CapCut, and then export them to TikTok when you’re done.

*Note: You don’t want to do this all the time. TikTok favors users using the app to post videos as it helps differentiate bot accounts from actual users. So just make sure not to replace the app with CapCut, especially as you’re first starting out.

Gathering Data On Your Niche

I just learned how to do this two days ago, and I’m so excited to try it out and see how to adjust based on what I learned. When you search for a topic like booktok, you will see that there is a little filter icon to the right of the search bar. When you click on it, you have the ability to filter your results based on things like Relevance or Like count. Then you can adjust the Video category based on how many likes it had, people you follow, and when it was posted.

This gives you quick insight into which videos were most popular in your targeted searches. Looking at this made me realize that the most popular videos on booktok had books in them. I mean, it shouldn’t be a surprise, but like I said, I’m not good with trends.

Getting followers right off the bat

I did it a cheap and easy way.

First, I made some videos. Then one day as I was scrolling through my home page, I saw a video with a voiceover, declaring this was a Reader follow party. Here’s how it went, you follow that creator and comment. They follow you back. Then you like each comment. If someone likes your comment, you follow them, and every comment you like will get you a follow.

Of course not everyone actually does it, but it got me my first couple hundred followers. Now I’m trying to see if I can grow the rest organically. After my little introduction video, I added around 100 followers, and another 200 have just slowly happened. But I found this was an easy way to engage with the booktok community and get some confidence as I do.

Developing Your One Month Plan

Once you have the basics of your account set up, have a plan. Mine is as follows:

1. Post one short video a day (I have fallen short of this goal).

2. Gather the analytics for your videos using the Business analytics tools.

3. Pay attention to what is getting you views and follows, and equally as important, what isn’t.

4. Adjust, adjust, adjust. This isn’t a simple plug and play strategy. Like all good things, it’s going to take time. To date, I have two subscribes on my Substack directly from TikTok, and 542 TikTok followers. I have only mentioned my Substack once, in that introduction video, so I think it’s pretty good for my low effort week since I posted it.

This is installment one of what will be a reoccurring article as there are so many features and facts that I don’t know yet, but I hope this helps you get started. If you have any questions or lessons learned to share, please comment. If you know another writer who you think would benefit from this, please share it. And as always, happy writing!