Sept. 3, 2024
I’ll be the first to admit that social media sometimes baffles me.
I can use Facebook to a degree, and sometimes LinkedIn, and am getting better (but not that much better) with Instagram. For the most part, though, I don’t know a hash tag from a license tag.
That said, I kept reading that TikTok is vital to book promotion. So the time had come to plunge into the world of brief viral videos.
And what a world it is.
When I first set up an account, I saw immediately that all kinds of people were friending me, or following me, or connecting with me, or whatever the hell you call it when perfect strangers suddenly want to be best buddies. I mean, there were tons of them.
Oh, man, I thought, this is going to be way easier than I imagined. Get online and they will come.
Uh, yes and no.
Looking at all my new pals, I noticed something. A lot of them were women. Scantily clad women. Women with names like pinkisbrat and imyourdaddyssugar. (I’ve changed the identities to protect the terminally attention-starved.)
Hustlers and hookers and vamps, oh my.
And here I thought TikTok was the province of 10-year-olds who apparently lacked adult supervision. Imagine my surprise.
Needless to say, I more or less abandoned the Grand TikTok Experiment. Sure, I’ll reach out to book reviewers and influencers (though the one I did message came back trying to sell me crypto). But other than that, I think I’ll just leave it to the youth of America and the Chinese who may or may not be using the platform to manipulate or pervert or twist our collective minds.
Or maybe I’ll just go be pals with Elon on X. After dodging overtures from grifting temptresses, it might be cool just to hang with a seeming 10-year-old who really does lack adult supervision.
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