TikTok Viral.
Do all artists have to create a TikTok now?
When I began my memoir in June of 2023, one of the questions that plagued me was who was to read it anyway. For a memoir, I assumed only successful people have successful ones. Born A Crime by Trevor Noah being my favorite book exacerbated this question. It appeared that only people who had gone through great strife, struggles and tribulations and overcame had a story worth telling. That also seemed to be the theme from many memoirs and fiction books like NoViolet’s, We Need New Names and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. All these follow the lives of people who had richer experiences marred with great triumph over intense struggle such that my moving from Zimbabwe to America story felt like champagne problems compared to, say, surviving Apartheid in South Africa or being a black adopted child by a white mother in the days of civil-rights-movement America.
Today, I am twelve chapters into that memoir. Regardless of how much I questioned my idea, it never died down. It was, in fact, more fulfilling to engage that part of me than let it devour me in my sleep and probably be the cause of regret in the coming future. Also, after a lot of introspection and external inspiration, I found that everyone's story is unique and would resonate with at least one person somewhere out there. However, the initial question remained poignant.
Thus, this blog was born with a desire to publicly share my ideas as I had already been previously doing on Medium and my blog. The move to Substack was deliberate, drawing inspiration from Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work, to build an audience or, more accurately, a mailing list. But, even with this new platform, as Rebecca Jennings of Vox puts it to us in an article titled: Everyone’s A Sellout Now, “The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand.” For me, this looked like creating a TikTok, Twitter and Instagram presence to highlight my writings. “And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record,” she writes, “ it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.”
It’s easy to make an Instagram post. Showing personality, however, which the algorithms award, takes more effort. While sharing quotes from books I was reading on Instagram seemed like a viable initial idea, eventually it felt fake. While there were, ‘bookstagrammers’ who had built audiences around the same idea and shared book stacks of reading recommendations, carefully curated by colour or some artistic aesthetic, for me, venturing down that route felt more like virtue signalling. It was as if I was saying, “Hey look at me, I’m better because I read philosophy and psychology.” I then turned to TikTok, where everyone is just living their best lives, trying to be funny and hardly selling get-rich-quick schemes or flashing expensive lifestyles almost all the time.
‘I should drive traffic to my blog’ is what I was thinking and the only way to do so was what other ‘booktokers’ were doing, which was to share the ideas they were working on. As a first instinct, I provided a short commentary on an article I had previously written hoping viewers would go and read more about it and simultaneously subscribe to the blog. In the Vox article, Jennings talks about how the process is not guaranteed: “The labour of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.” I learnt that reality very fast, TikTok loves funny videos and just girls being beautiful.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
When I decided to follow the trends, do funny and relatable videos, and narrow down my hashtags to #Zimtiktok, I gained more views. The highest being a video that is currently sitting at 140,000 views, 13,000 likes, 1446 comments and 579 saves at the time of this writing. These aren’t massive numbers for what is considered a viral video on TikTok, but for the numbers that I was doing, this was massive. I moved from just 200 followers to about 800 followers in a 3-day timeframe. All these new numbers, or people were the result of one niche funny video that had nothing to do with what I had in all my articles whereas I was on TikTok to market my writing. Today, I stand at over 1000 followers, another milestone achievement.
With this new stroke of goodwill, I would wake up every morning and check where my followers and likes count were. I also began to feel internal pressure to create more of the same content that had gone viral, you know, try to make another viral video while I still have the limelight on me.
And that is the problem!
To create content that fed the comments that said: “I can relate, so funny…, the accuracy, and looks like we all live the same lives,” meant that I had to search TikTok for more inspiration and keep the likes and followers on a rising trajectory. In the Vox article, Jennifer goes on to talk about many influencers who confess to influencing having ruined their lives.
“YouTubers have said the pressure of posting their lives led them to deep unhappiness, depression, and anxiety, but that they feel like they can’t take breaks because they know the algorithm will punish them,” she writes. “In almost every interview I do with TikTokers, they want to talk about how burned out they feel, pretty much all the time.” I had felt burned out from one viral video and horrible from the extended time I spent on the platform. I also felt like an imposter because my motivations were abandoning my motivation to be on the platform: which was to share my ideas, the ones I share on my blog.
All this is not to excuse the hard work and inevitable putting oneself out there required for everyone trying to build a brand online. But, it is also true that it takes away from the actual art —writing, making music, drawing or whatever the art may be. If it were done solely for its own sake, maybe the conversation would be different.
Despite all the war has shifted to fighting cheap dopamine and defining ourselves by the number of likes, followers and comments on the art we create, the work must be done or else we suffer the fate of our art dwindling into insignificance. The art can speak for itself, sure. Sometimes it is never the art, it is the story behind it that people buy. It is the person behind the business that investors invest in.
So, in a nutshell, you’re probably going to find me on TikTok trying to finesse the algorithms, following the trends and creating witty content to attract an audience that may in the future be swindled into subscribing to my newsletter and buying my debut novel.
For now, that’s all that matters: building and growing an audience and it seems the only way to do so, in the truest spirit of the American dream, is to treat oneself as a brand, a small business. All this echoes the famous line by Jay-Z from his hit song Diamonds from Sierra Leone:
“I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man."
If you loved this please leave a comment or share your favorite part on social media. Don’t forget to check out my Instagram and Twitter. I give updates of exciting news on there.
Until next time:
Peace✌🏾 and love 💓.
Aluta Continua✊🏾
What I’m reading:
The River Between by Ngugi Wa Thiongo
Favourite song/album of the week:
I recently discovered ‘The Caveman’, a group from Nigeria and I love their traditional elements and beautiful vocals.
You've got real posts here that are not superficial! I hope Substackers can appreciate that. I find social media due to algorithms favoring payers and influencers is no longer a viable way to connect (unless you have an influencer tout your thing), so I've returned to old fashioned showing up where people are and making meaningful deep personal connections. Capitalism is all about the capital flowing to the top, why would social media be any different? All of the action is consolidated in one corner while the rest of us realize we are just consumers... Again.