The Weekender, August 16, 2026: The Antivirals

No, this post isn't about Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. It's about social media.

One of the things I hate about being a writer, and man do I hate it, is the emphasis gap you're forced to endure between producing your content and trying to promote it. And with a project like this, which I'm doing under a pen name and no sponsorships or strategic alliances or capital support, you're utterly dependent on trying to make social media content which goes viral and gets attention for the site.

Sometimes, I'm finding, I can do that. Most of the time I can't. I'm not alone. I see writers complaining about this stuff all the time. On Amazon, the average self-published novel sells... 12 copies. And self-published novels, following a pattern of all books there, are now more than 60 percent of all the books sold on that platform.

And all of the content you crank out to promote your real content, the stuff you want to monetize by building an audience and having them subscribe, isn't necessarily moving in the same direction as the actual work.

For example, I've done a couple of promo videos for the site this past week. Here's one which pushed Episode 4...

...and here's another one I did to push the site:

The first one, I really liked. It's directly tied to Episode 4 - it's essentially an aside by Amber that you'd get if she'd stepped out of the episode to speak to the audience. You're actually getting something out of it.

The second one's just a pretty face. Amber looks good in it, for sure, but there isn't a lot to it.

Both dropped on Friday. The second one so far has three times the traffic of the first one.

I would have predicted the opposite. Shows you what I know.

At Higgsfield, they have an app they call the Virality Predictor. I ran both of these videos through that app, and... both of them failed.

With the exact same score.

Great. Thanks, guys. Really useful.

I'm starting to realize, though, that I'm not really in the viral-content business here. That might come off as snooty, I guess, but it's not meant that way.

What I'm getting at is while I'm stuck trying to get attention for this thing, what I'd rather do is tell a story. I have my doubts that trying to pop viral on Instagram and YouTube accomplishes anything along those lines.

Is it a dilemma? Hell, I don't know. It's something I'm sort of struggling with. I'm trying to entertain folks who care about this story, not please a horde of people on Instagram who mostly drop comments like "AI Slop!" all day.

You're on Instagram complaining about AI video? Really? On Instagram? Good grief.

It's a bit frustrating. Of course, what I'm doing with this project is really new. Illustrating a web novel with, essentially, cinematic film clips is a different animal than anything else. So selling and promoting it is a special sort of challenge. I'm trying to make a market for the genre, not just this particular project.

Ahead of its time? Perhaps.

And I think I'm better at writing than I am at marketing. They're very different skill sets.

Wide open to suggestions, of course. Drop a line in the comments if you have something I should look at.