The current advice for author platform building assumes you are willing to be on camera. Not occasionally, consistently. TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts: the format changes but the basic requirement does not. Regular video content, ideally showing your face, ideally on a schedule. This framing has become so dominant that authors who are not on short-form video often describe it as something they should be doing and have not got around to, rather than as a deliberate choice they have made.
That should-but-haven’t framing is worth examining. It treats short-form video as the necessary path, with the only question being whether the author has managed to get started. That is not accurate. Short-form video is one path, and for some authors it performs well. For the majority of indie fiction authors, it is either an uncomfortable fit, a time cost that is difficult to sustain, or both.
The platforms where short-form video has produced consistent results for indie authors are specific. BookTok in particular has been meaningful for certain genres, primarily romance, romantasy, and certain fantasy subgenres where the visual and emotional content translates to clip format. Outside those genre contexts, the results are substantially more variable. A thriller author doing writing-process videos on TikTok is not operating in the same environment as a dark romance author who has an established reader community there. The data that gets cited, the viral BookTok that moved tens of thousands of copies, describes a specific slice of the indie market. It does not describe most of it.
What actually builds a platform for fiction authors who are not doing short-form video is less dramatic and more durable: a consistent presence in the places where their specific readers actually are, combined with a direct channel that does not depend on algorithm reach.
For most indie fiction authors, that means Instagram. Static posts and Stories, not Reels, used with some regularity and built around the visual world of the book. Covers, aesthetic imagery, process moments that feel real rather than performed. Instagram’s static feed still works for fiction authors when the content is coherent and the engagement is genuine. Authors who have abandoned Instagram entirely because Reels did not fit their workflow are sometimes leaving behind an audience that was there and willing to engage on other terms.
Beyond Instagram, the most consistently useful platform for fiction authors outside short-form video is the email list. Email reach is not subject to algorithmic change. A reader who has given you their address and opens your messages is a reader relationship that does not break when a platform makes a product decision. The fiction-specific considerations for what that list should contain are a separate question, but the structural point holds: email is the channel that survives platform shifts.
Substack has also become a meaningful option for certain fiction authors, particularly those whose readers are willing to seek out longer-form content. It does not generate the broad reach that Instagram can, but it creates a different kind of reader relationship, one built on readers who actively chose to follow rather than encountering a post in a feed. For authors with an established readership, it tends to work better than for authors still in early audience-building.
The mistake most authors make when building a platform without short-form video is trying to compensate with volume elsewhere. Five Instagram posts a week, multiple Facebook groups, a Substack, and a newsletter running simultaneously. That approach creates a different version of the same problem: fragmented activity that feels like work and produces diminishing returns across all of it.
A platform is not the sum of an author’s posting activity. It is the system that lets readers find the work, stay informed about new releases, and feel enough connection to recommend it to someone else. That system can be small. What it needs to be is functional and consistent, not exhaustive.
The authors who sustain platform building most reliably built fewer things with more intention. They made a deliberate decision about which two or three channels fit their work and their capacity, and they stopped treating the others as items they were behind on. Not being on every platform is a positioning choice, not a deficit.
If short-form video is not yours, the useful version of that sentence is: “I am not building on TikTok, and instead I am building on X, Y, and Z.” The specificity matters. An author who has decided not to be on short-form video makes different choices than one who is perpetually meaning to get around to it. The first has a platform strategy. The second has a growing list of things to feel behind on.
If you want to work through what a sustainable platform looks like for your genre and your reader base, get in touch or take a look at how Literary Inspired works with authors on platform and content strategy.
