Saturday, November 2nd & 9th, 2024

Live Seminar via Zoom from 10AM - 11:30AM Eastern on Consecutive Saturdays

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.

Instructor Sanibel Lazar's debut novel To Have and Have More will be published by 8th Note Press in April 2025. Her writing appears in NYmag, ELLE, Air Mail, Literary Hub, and more. She earned her MFA from The New School and was awarded a 2023 residency by the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. You can find Sanibel on TikTok here.

Learn more about Sanibel in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

This TikTok 101 course will teach students how to make content that gets potential readers interested in their writing using journalism techniques. If you’ve ever wondered, should I be on TikTok? This course is for you. 

BookTok is on the lips of everyone in publishing. It’s a kingmaker. It’s a nefarious force that’s ruining literature. It’s a godsend that’s making young people buy books. No matter what you think, BookTok is a powerful marketing tool that every writer should at least consider harnessing.

In this course I’ll cover the basics of TikTok (how the algorithm works, what is considered a good amount of views, the best time to post, how to engage with followers) and give you the tools to make your first videos and assess whether investing time in social media will help propel your writing career.

The most common mistake I see writers committing on TikTok (and I’m talking about bestselling authors and writers who are far more established in their career than I) is making ads for their book. If you’re a fledgling writer, you most likely won’t build an audience if all you’re talking about is your writing. To get eyeballs on your content and to amass followers, you need to provide what people come to TikTok for: entertainment. 

As a commerce journalist, my day job is all about getting people to click on my articles: It’s headline-first writing and successful TikTok content is built on the same principles (clickbait). In this course, I’ll teach you how to identify the themes in your writing that will best convert to content (e.g. privilege and elitism are major themes in my prep school book, but on TikTok the best buzzwords are “ultra-wealthy”, “status symbols”, “rich life”). 

We’ll discuss the categories of content (writer life/educational/trends/montage) and audiences you can target. I’ll share my best practices for engagement and etiquette, the traps I fell into, and the differences between posting on TikTok and Instagram. Finally, I’ll describe what I’ve learned about how TikTok followers translate beyond the app (pre-sales, podcasts).

COURSE OUTLINE:

Class 1: Intro, what is BookTok/How TikTok’s algorithm works, case studies of authors who have used TT well/poorly, estb difference between author TT goals and general content creator goals, content 101 (breakdown some of my videos and why they performed well/poorly), pinpoint what makes successful content (journalism lesson), brainstorm the “clickbait” equivalents of writing themes, headline workshop.

HOMEWORK: Make at least 3 tiktoks.

Class 2: How to analyze results (drop off after 2 seconds, etc), how to pivot if none of the videos took off, critique of class’ tiktoks, how to migrate content to instagram (and best practices for Insta), dealing with comments/followers, more advanced content techniques, discussion of what kind of success is replicable (and types of videos are better as one-offs).

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Logistics of content (best practices of filming, how to edit efficiently, how often to post).
• What to avoid (common writer content mistakes, why don’t bestselling authors automatically succeed on TikTok?). 
  
• How to use “clickbait principles” to make content that “stops the scroll”.
• How to write catchy headlines.
• ”Brand building” (as much as I hate this term, it’s very applicable).
• Understanding of TikTok vs Instagram audience -If/when to engage with followers.