Impressing the Kids on the TweetTok

They say you need to have a large following if you want to be an author. Even if you have a great book, publishers don't want to publish anything from someone who doesn't have a large following. But the problem is, how do you get that large following if you don't have something published? It's a catch-22, and it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy.

But it's also hard to justify spending hours on Tweeter, TokTik, or Instacart. All these sites the kids are on seem like a distraction from the important things in life. Plus, I write children's books, and there is just something creepy about trying to get kids or their moms to follow me on social media. Would I just end up being a kind of reverse Dylan Mulvaney? Is that what I want to be?

At the same time, it's embarrassing to admit that I have almost no followers on social media. I once had a couple thousand people on my email list. The problem with that was I had to constantly promote other people's books, even if I didn't like them. Over time, I stopped sending email promotions and purged and purged the list until it was a fraction of what it once was.

It's so tiny now that with one of my recent emails, only about twelve people opened it. Other people out there have millions or hundreds of millions of followers. I can barely get twelve people to open an email. That's a little embarrassing. I was praying to God about what's the point of all this. Why am I called to write? Why is this on my heart? Is it even worth my time in the morning to write these blog posts? And God just kinda said, "What are you worrying about? Why do you care? I only had 12 followers too. Just keep doing what you're doing."

It's hard not to laugh at that, but it's true. In a world where everything depends on your follower count, Jesus Christ, the most significant influencer in history, would have once been considered a failure. He drew crowd after crowd, but instead of working on building up his follower count, instead of being concerned with numbers, he allowed people to fall away because he wasn't willing to compromise the kingdom of God. He was unwilling to take the Devil's offer in the wilderness. He was unwilling to sacrifice God's plan for an enormous earthly following.

Now, don't take this as any kind of comparison. Everyone knows I'm no Jesus Christ, but who's better footsteps to follow in than Him? If I only have twelve dedicated people interested in consistently opening my emails, then I couldn't be in better company because it's not the number of people that follow us. It's the quality. And I think that is what I have to start focusing on. The quality of the people around me, the quality of what I'm saying, what I'm doing, and what I'm putting out there. It's really about deep relationships versus superficial ones.

And so, in my own small way, I will keep continuing with this. If I don't spend time on social media and I never grow this list beyond what it is, then that's okay. Maybe it even goes down from here. Maybe, I have nine followers, or seven or one? All that really matters is staying true to that commitment, and God will do glorious things with it. You can have millions of followers and really have no eternal impact, and you can also have literally zero followers on social media, and God can still do glorious, world-changing things through you.