I have watched a generation of talented authors turn themselves into unpaid content employees of companies that do not know their names. They post daily. They chase the trending sound. They study the analytics like scripture, searching for the pattern that will finally make the machine notice them. And most of them, after years of this, have precisely what they started with: a small audience, a large exhaustion, and no book anyone remembers. I think this is a tragedy, and I think it was sold to them on purpose.

Here is the thing no one selling social media courses will tell you. The platform’s interests and yours are not aligned. Its goal is to keep users on the platform. Your goal is to send readers off the platform and toward your book. Every time you succeed at your goal, you fail at the platform’s, which is exactly why the machine throttles the posts with links, buries the calls to action, and rewards the content that keeps people scrolling rather than buying. You are not losing the game. You are playing a game designed for you to lose.

The rented land problem

Everything you build on a platform, you build on rented land. Your following is not yours; it is the platform’s, lent to you at an interest rate that rises whenever the company changes its model, which it does, without warning, whenever it likes. Authors who spent five years building an audience have watched that audience become unreachable overnight because a setting changed in a building they will never enter. You do not own what you cannot reach without permission.

Compare this to the assets that are actually yours. An email list is yours; no algorithm stands between you and the people on it. A body of earned coverage is yours; it sits on the searchable web, working whether or not you posted today. A reputation is yours; it compounds and it cannot be throttled. These are unglamorous, and they do not deliver the little dopamine hit of a post that did numbers, but they have one enormous advantage over everything the feed offers. They belong to you.

What to do instead, stated plainly

• Own your audience. Build the email list. It is the one channel no platform can take from you or tax on a whim.
• Bank permanent assets. Earned coverage on the open web works for years and answers to no algorithm.
• Use platforms as megaphones, not foundations. Post to amplify things that live elsewhere, then go back to writing.
• Stop measuring the wrong thing. Engagement is the platform’s metric. Sales, list growth, and durable visibility are yours.

I am not a Luddite, and I am not telling you to delete your accounts. I am telling you to stop treating a rented megaphone as if it were a house. Post if you like. But build the house somewhere you own the land, because the algorithm was never going to love you back, and the years you spend waiting for it to are years you will not get to spend building something that lasts.