Use your author name as your handle on every social media platform – that’s a no-brainer. But many handles are already taken nowadays, so use @AUTHORyourname instead. If that is already taken, there must be another author with your name out there, which means that thinking about a pen name in general is a good idea.
You can follow my Grok Diary in real time here: @michael_brig
Last month, I asked Grok for its best writing advice, one tip at a time. Let’s go through them:
Writing Tip #30 | Read widely and deliberately every day. Study other authors to improve your own writing.
Writing Tip #29 | Write every day, even if it’s just 200 words. Daily practice makes you a better writer.
Writing Tip #28 | Finish your first draft before you start editing. Separate the creative writing process from the technical editing process.
Writing Tip #27 | Study story structure. Check out, for example, the Save the Cat! method.
Writing Tip #26 | Show, don’t tell. Reveal emotions and character traits through actions and dialogue instead of describing them directly.
Writing Tip #25 | Give every character a clear goal and a meaningful flaw.
Writing Tip #24 | Raise the stakes with every major story beat. Your characters need to have something to lose.
Writing Tip #23 | Put conflict in every scene.
Writing Tip #22 | End every chapter with tension, a question, or an unfinished action.
Writing Tip #21 | Your protagonist must make active choices. Force them to make difficult decisions with consequences, but never take away the agency of your main character.
Writing Tip #20 | Dialogue should carry subtext. Don’t make characters say exactly what they mean. Use implications and body language to say it instead.
Writing Tip #19 | Foreshadow key plot turns. Plant clues that pay off later.
Writing Tip #18 | Enter scenes as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Throw readers directly into the action whenever you can.
Writing Tip #17 | Trust the reader. Skip unnecessary explanations. Readers are smart enough to understand what you’re trying to say.
Writing Tip #16 | Use strong verbs and concrete nouns. Use fewer modifiers. Be precise instead of vague.
Writing Tip #15 | Ground scenes in sensory details. Use smell, sound, sight, texture, and taste to bring scenes to life.
Writing Tip #14 | Kill your darlings. Cut scenes and lines if they fail to advance the plot, even if you love them.
Writing Tip #13 | Vary sentence length and structure. Pair short lines with longer, flowing sentences. Think about the rhythm of your writing. If the rhythm is always the same, the text becomes boring to read.
Writing Tip #12 | Build every scene around one clear goal and one obstacle. If your scenes don’t have these, they probably aren’t needed. If a scene has more than one central goal or obstacle, consider splitting it into multiple scenes.
Writing Tip #11 | Internal conflict and external pressure should be in balance. If your character falls apart under minor pressure, they become unbelievable. The same goes for characters who don’t even flinch when facing extreme pressure.
Writing Tip #10 | Force characters to make choices with lasting consequences. There are no easy wins in interesting stories. Make every character pay a price for their decisions.
Writing Tip #9 | Every description should reveal something. If you describe a character’s clothing, for example, it should reveal something about their personality or character. If it doesn’t, we probably don’t need the description in the first place.
Writing Tip #8 | Grok repeated writing tip #18. Enter scenes as late as possible and leave as early as possible. It seems like the AI ran out of capacity to understand what it had already told me.
Writing Tip #7 | Another repetition, but this time it at least gave me a variation of tip #20. Master the art of subtext. Body language, dialogue, and even silence can be used to say something without saying it explicitly.
Writing Tip #6 | Give every major character a distinct voice and an internal motivation for their thoughts and actions.
Writing Tip #5 | End every chapter with tension. Again, this is a bit of a repetition of tip #22.
Writing Tip #4 | Have a tension curve that rises as the story progresses. Big stakes should follow smaller stakes.
Writing Tip #3 | Center the story on the protagonist’s emotional transformation.
Writing Tip #2 | Your protagonist must have a clear, burning desire that motivates their actions.
Writing Tip #1 | Put the reader first in every decision. A great tip to end the series. Write the stories you want to tell, but when you do, think about the reader and how you can make the experience as easy and entertaining as possible.
After Grok recommended it, I started a dedicated author channel on YouTube.
I already have a channel with 13K subscribers, and at first, I thought I could simply add my author content there as well. However, these videos didn’t perform very well. My existing channel is focused on video and photo editing tutorials, so my author content doesn’t really fit the channel.
Since Grok recommended creating a dedicated author channel, I decided to start over. It’s tough to start from scratch once again with zero subscribers, but does it really matter if you have 13K subscribers and none of them are interested in your author videos because it’s completely off-topic?
Once I had made that decision, the next question was: What does Grok recommend when it comes to starting a YouTube channel as an author?
Try to connect your YouTube channel to your overall author platform. Look at your X, Instagram, website, and other platforms and make sure your YouTube channel fits in with them.
That specifically means:
Don’t spend money in the beginning—you don’t have to.
Use your smartphone camera, a free screen recorder, and edit your videos with CapCut, which is free in its basic version. Use Audacity for audio editing, which is completely free, and design your thumbnails with Canva, which also has a free tier.
If you have some money to spend, invest in a good microphone first. You can already get a decent one for under $100.
Video Titles | Focus on clarity and honest value. Titles should be specific. Numbers often work well. Examples:
Keywords | Use YouTube Keyword tools and Google Trends to find relevant keywords. Apply the same basic principles on YouTube that you would use for blogging SEO.
Keyword Stuffing | As with blogging, think about the audience first. Don’t stuff unrelated keywords into your videos. It can only hurt your platform in the long term.
Clickbait | Finding long-term readers is about building a good community, especially for indie authors. So be honest and authentic. Never lie to your audience. Clickbait is one of the worst things you can do when you’re trying to build a community.
Collaborations | Search for other indie authors, review their books, and then reach out to them. If they are legitimate authors, you’ll often find their email address on their channel’s About page. Aim for people with a comparable audience size who write in the same genre as you. In general, give something to these authors before you expect them to give something to you.
Lead Magnets | If you have a freebie to offer in exchange for email subscriptions, add a link to it in every YouTube video description. Mine is a link to the free book I offer to my newsletter subscribers.
Currently, I don’t think so. You can use Rumble or Odysee as backup platforms, but the audience for fiction authors is on YouTube. It seems that the alternative platforms currently attract mainly people and audiences interested in non-mainstream political content.
From my experience, YouTube is a marathon.
I published content almost daily for three years on my tutorial channel until I had more than 1K subscribers. If you publish weekly content on a fresh author channel without an existing audience elsewhere, it’s probably going to take years to build a channel that can become a meaningful asset.
Only a few people achieve overnight success on YouTube. Be aware of that before you start.
YouTube is the most important video platform, and it will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future. If you have some time to spare, it’s worth getting into.
But weekly videos are not going to make you famous overnight. Use YouTube as a supplement to your overall author platform. Writing novels and running your own website and mailing list are still the most important outlets.
You can follow my Grok Diary in real time here: @michael_brig
I won’t heavily invest into Instagram. Setting up the basics is still worthwhile I think. But I won’t create daily content or anything. Writing books, managing my website, and being on YouTube and X is already enough work.
You can follow my Grok Diary in real time here: @michael_brig