Hi guyyyys! Just here to share my authentic self

Illustration by David Foldvari

Social media had become a problem for me, I have to admit. I used to have Twitter. Oh boy, did I have Twitter. I loved Twitter. At my peak around 2013, I had nearly 100,000 followers and I was personally blocked by Donald Trump. (Another story.) And then that box-titted intergalactic Goebbels bought it and you found yourself jammed in the middle of a virtual Nuremberg rally, trying to make a joke about schnitzel or whatever while they got the book-burning going.

I finally left last year. Bluesky looked promising for a moment and then... not. On Facebook I’d often see a conversation that interested me and then I’d notice the words “4 days ago”. Jesus. Are you really going to burst through the curtain with your bon mot four days later? When you did sometimes throw something in, you’d maybe get a reply another four days after that. It all felt like talking to your very elderly relative in a care home.

Twitter appealed in the old days because it was like a fast and funny writers’ room: give me your best line right now. I got why writers would be on Twitter: it was writing. What was a writer going to do on Instagram? Here is a photo of me staring at my desk. Or out the window. In fact, what a lot of writers post on Instagram largely falls into two categories.

Unsuccessful Writers = “inspirational” writing quotes.

Successful Writers = “my fabulous life” photographs.

The former needs no description, although Unsuccessful Writer may mix it up a little with long, self-congratulatory, hashtag-bespattered posts about their latest piccolo triumph. Something like: “Yay! My one-man play Up the Shitter is extending its run to a second week, upstairs at the Frog and Sex Case, Doncaster Road, Pontefract. #play #writing #iamwriting #success #pinter

With Successful Writer, things will be more along the lines of: “Here is a photograph of me in the first-class lounge/a five-star hotel/a jacuzzi/a swimming pool/Buckingham Palace-actually-being-knighted.” But the image will be accompanied by a self-deprecatory comment so obvious that it makes you want to embark on the kind of hunt-and-kill revenge mission that would have Liam Neeson emitting a low whistle of awe.

“Be great if you could do more in the Instagram space, John.”

Off I went on my well-polished rant about author videos. “Hi guuyyyyss! It’s Steve Author here to tell you all about my new boo – OH MY GOD I’M IN A HOSTAGE VIDEO! WHAT AM I DOING? WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY LIFE? WHY OH WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME? I AM A SIMPLE NERD BEING FORCED TO PRESENT A BASTARD GAMESHOW! HELLPP MEEE!”

One becomes a novelist for many reasons. Some have a facility for description so acute it borders on the poetic, masters of what John Updike called “giving the mundane its beautiful due”. Some can craft complex plots. Some are polyphonic, inhabiting multiple human minds with uncanny precision. Some geniuses can do all these things. But something I think all writers have in common is that the world doesn’t quite line up properly for them and they feel compelled to comment on it. What I’m pretty sure none of us wanted when choosing this writing life was to become an appalling children’s TV presenter delivering a speech to camera so stilted it would curl to breaking the toes of anyone watching it. Lovely Marketing Person told me that these talking-to-camera videos got the most engagement on Instagram. Really? Once again, my finger was not on the pulse of Britain. Whenever I see anyone talking to camera on social media, I turn the sound off and scroll by so fast that there are burn marks on the screen.

Now I get that some people must do this for a living. If you really are a TV presenter, or you work in, say, beauty products, go with God, my friend. But novelists? Have you any idea how hard it is to sit in a room for two years (10 if you’re Donna Tartt) and dream up an entire universe out of nothing? It used to be enough to do this and then hand it over. Now? You must become some awful circus barker hawking product down the lens. Anyway, I said all this – and much more – to Lovely Marketing Person in spittle-flecked, expletive-spattered Scottish invective.

“Do this,” she said. “Do what you’re doing right now.”

God help me reader, I did it. I did it right there at the kitchen table, thinking something like: “Well, this should put an end to the whole thing.” I pressed “Record’ and whined...

“Hi guuuyyyysssssss!”

Naturally the bastard clip (or “reel” as I believe the kids call it) quickly racked up more than 50,000 views, 1,200 likes and hundreds of replies. I gained hundreds of new followers. Rookie numbers for a Kardashian, to be sure, but big stats for old John. Apparently, people really did want to see a late-middle aged man with eyes like dug’s baws screaming at clouds for two minutes. “You see,” Lovely Marketing Person told me. “People love authenticity.”

So now I must do more of the bastard things. Gotta feed the Content Beast. Spank the algo. Frot the machine.

Authentically.

John Niven’s latest novel, The Fathers, is published by Canongate (£18.99). Order a copy at The Observer Shop for £17.09. Delivery charges may apply