How writer Amy Zhang mastered TikTok

The Cartographers author shares tips for writers looking to make the leap to short-form video.

For me at least, Twitter is now a ghost town. After stubbornly not scrolling for most of 2022, I’ll admit that I tuned back in after Elon Musk took over to see if it would burn down, and the experience reminded me of why Twitter used to be fun, especially during big news moments. But it’s almost as if Elon Musk was Twitter’s last main character, and now that we’ve tired of him, what remains isn’t all that interesting. People have either left the platform or found that they simply don’t have much to say. 

This means, among other things, that writers—who comprise a big chunk of the platform—have to figure out how they’ll promote their work. I started following author Amy Zhang on TikTok for that very reason. She’s the author of two books, with a third, The Cartographers, coming out this January. But despite working in a written medium, she had found a compelling way to translate what she does to short-form video. 

Sure, you can read your writing out loud or point to it using the green screen feature. But if you want to truly secure your place on TikTok, you have to speak its language—which means people don’t just want to see your writing. They want to see what being a writer looks like. 

Zhang sold her first novel, Falling Into Place, when she was 16, so social media has pretty much always been a marketing tool, rather than a strictly personal outlet, for her. But on TikTok, it’s the personal that sells, and Zhang’s videos invite viewers to peek behind the curtain of her life as a writer and ceramicist in ways that are both aspirational and educational. 

In this interview for paid subscribers, Zhang and I discuss how writers can adapt to making video content, the pressures of social media in the publishing industry, and how TikTok, specifically, is changing our relationship with books.