I broke TikTok and what that means for my pen name books in Ads Dungeon.
Welcome to the longest title ever.
Dear Diary,
About three weeks ago, I lost access to one of my TikTok accounts. By “lost access” I mean I forgot my password. It was more a “me” problem.
Yes, I have a system. Yes, sometimes, there is a user-error in that system.
I have several TikTok accounts: I have one for my Elodie Nowodazkij books/writing, one business one for my Swans Cove Series, one business one for my self-publishing and one for my pen name where I share snippets.
And some of them haven’t been updated in months.
Well, my pen name one logged off and impossible to log back in.
Full disclosure: I can post a video and leave TikTok. I usually don’t get sucked in. And if I stay on TikTok it’s to trained the algorithm. It’s a different story on Instagram where cat reels *will* get me more often. And also: The Chemical Engineer and close friends send me funny reels. :-)
It’s another reminder that I should really back up my work more often. But since I now do early access on Ream: I basically have my work in more than one place.
Soooo what does that mean for TikTok? Why do I say I broke it?
Because even with my previous pen name videos, I got stuck in the "dozens” views. And let me tell you, twelve views isn’t a lot. For my business account, I also got stuck into being pushed to accounts who I don’t think read steamy romcoms. I haven’t been using it regularly.
Do I need to post regularly?
Not really.
Right now, most of my income comes from readers finding my books after reading a permafree, my latest BookBub or for my Kindle Vella from Facebook Ads.
But I also know that TikTok worked to have readers wanting to read more of Kindle Vella. I had a poll more than a year ago, asking where the readers had heard about the serial and many of them answered “TikTok.”
Plus, for my steamy forbidden romance, well, it’s one of my ways to also let KU readers know these books exist, because Amazon doesn’t want to advertise them. I tried. I talked to them. It has words that get those books pinged, but it’s not anything “bad” or “illegal” or anything like that and it’s not erotica (you really want to know what it is now, don’t you? :-))
So… now I’m left with restarting that account from scratch. Coming up with new hooks (I do enjoy that quite a bit).
I’ve started this week at 108 followers and my latest TikTok video on that account had 72 views.
Not great.
But also progress…. because it started with many videos not even getting to fifteen views.
My goal is to post at least once every two days (using CapCut when I can) to try to get at least 200 views (which seemed to be a magic number for me on my previous non-locked account), update you all in one to three months and let you know (a) did I manage to get at least one book ad working/approved, (b) what my view count is.
Do you use TikTok as part of your marketing?
Also, if you’re reading this…. tell me, tell me, what would you love me to share next?
Interesting! Good luck with re-establishing on TikTok. If I were going to pick tho, I’d want to hear more on how you leverage Bookbub!