From Thomas
I Wrote a Book. Then I Had to Learn TikTok.
Publishing a book was one challenge. Learning how to talk about it online turned out to be another. This is the beginning of my Author’s Journal — an honest look at what happens after the writing is finished.
When I started writing Time, I was thinking about the story.
I wasn’t thinking about TikTok.
I wasn’t thinking about algorithms, followers, profile links, promotional videos or trying to work out why one video reaches people while another seems to disappear almost immediately.
I certainly didn’t imagine that becoming a published author would eventually involve sitting with a phone in my hand trying to understand social media.
But here we are.
Time is now out in the world, and one of the things I am quickly discovering is that finishing a book and publishing a book are only part of the journey.
Then comes the strange part.
You have to tell people it exists.
For somebody who has spent so much time concentrating on words, characters and ideas, suddenly having to turn those thoughts into a few seconds of video can feel like learning an entirely different language.
Setting up TikTok was a good example.
At first, things that probably seem completely normal to people who use social media every day felt surprisingly complicated. What should I post? What should I say? Should I be talking directly to the camera? Should I explain the book? Should I show it? How often should I post?
And perhaps the biggest question of all:
How do you promote something you care deeply about without making every post feel like an advert?
I’m still learning the answer to that one.
What I have realised, though, is that readers don't necessarily want constant advertising.
They want to know the person behind the book.
They want to know where ideas came from, what writing it was actually like, what went wrong along the way and what happens after a book finally appears on the shelf.
That is one of the reasons this Author’s Journal now exists.
I want this to be somewhere I can write more openly about the journey behind Time and everything that comes next.
There will be posts about writing.
There will be posts about the books themselves.
There will probably be a few about trying to understand TikTok.
And as the Time story continues, with more books still to come, I want to document some of that journey while it is actually happening rather than trying to remember it years later.
Becoming an author has already taken me into places I never expected.
Apparently, one of them is TikTok.
I’m still finding my feet there.
But perhaps that is part of the story too.
Thomas Murphy