I Don't Get TikTok

I gave up on TikTok after about a week of creating my account. Everybody claims that BookTok is amazing! Sadly, I only got about three views on the handful of videos I posted. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I had no idea what. I made sure to add appropriate hashtags. Not that the videos were great, but it seems that more than three people would have seen them, if only by accident.

Then yesterday, I read Jane Friedman's newsletter, The Bottom Line, where she discussed the US Book Show panel she attended about TikTok, and one takeaway was, "...authenticity is key to why BookTok works so well for selling books."

Is that really true? Was I too quick to abandon the site?

I decided to give TikTok one more try. So, I went to log into my account, only to be told that my email address doesn't exist in their database. So...did my inactivity cause them to delete my account?  That seems kind of rude and premature. I wasn't away that long. Thus, I had to create another account (same email, by the way). 

Everyone says authors should start out by following BookTokers (yes, that's how it's actually spelled) and interacting with them. Fine. I did a search, found a few and followed all that aren't romance fanatics. As far as interacting...? I suppose I could go with, "I really like this", whatever "this" is. It's a handy, generic statement that works in many situations. 

But here's the deal. If no one bothers to look at my videos this time, I'll give up. I hate creating Canva videos; there's never any appropriate templates, and then I have to find audio for whatever I finally choose. Then I need to get the timing right. It's a lot of work for no reward. 

I'm dubious about TikTok to begin with...for me. It obviously works for writers of other genres, but its fanbase isn't exactly my demographic. 

Fellow authors, any tips for getting seen? (I've pondered before whether I actually exist, but it seems I really do ~ on other sites, at least.)

I like trying new things, but first those things need to make sense.