Social Media Dread Is Everywhere. These Authors Turned It Into New Worlds

Which comes first? The manuscript, the book deal, or the massive social media following to drive sales?

Malavika Kannan, 25, just published her first adult novel, Unprecedented Times , which follows Rishi, a college freshman determined to leave her youth activism behind for a tangible experience of sex, parties, and a liberal-arts education. When this mission is cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic, Rishi and her friends must reckon with how the personalities they created online clash with adult realities.

“A lot of Rishi’s sense of self is cultivated on the internet,” Kannan says. “Throughout the book, the gag is that she sometimes has an over-inflated sense of her own control and agency in the world, just because she has language for it.”

The internet is its own character in Kannan’s book. But she notes that the months leading up to publication made her starkly aware of how publishing’s relationship with social media creates an underlying strain for authors. And she’s not alone. The all-encompassing nature of social media has irrevocably changed consumer behavior — including how people buy books. The direct link between social media awareness and book sales has also created a difficult landscape for authors, one where social media has slowly shifted from a helpful tool to a requirement. Publishing isn’t the only industry where social media success can change a person’s trajectory. But as publishing demands and author hopes collide, some writers are using the pressure to perform online to embrace their digital selves — and use that as inspiration to make something new in the process.

“It’s just the soup that we’re swimming in,” Kannan says. “As much as I like to imagine literature as a refuge from the internet, the two are super intertwined.”

Although there are plenty of books that take off without the author already having a following, sales show a link between some of the biggest new titles and social media content. Publishers Weekly reported that 59 million print-book sales in 2024 were directly linked to content on BookTok, and print sales followed similar stable patterns in 2025. A handful of videos about a book could transform it into an overnight bestseller. So it’s no surprise that this environment is informing some of the most ambitious works of the year.

Hallie Elizabeth Newton, 42, has been active on Instagram since 2013. “It has an alluring way of curating exactly what you already know,” she says. “And in that way it can be very comforting. Not necessarily healthy, but definitely comforting.” That fondness is clear in her debut novel, Agnes Lives! The book, published in June, follows thirtysomething New Yorker Agnes as she spends an increasingly chaotic 24 hours trying to find a friend to murder her.

The tome is a more experimental offering than traditional fiction, and relies heavily on the conflicting narration from commenters and Agnes’ internal dialogue. But it also directly reflects Newton’s own feelings around social media and public personas. “There’s this gap between Agnes’ reality and what she’s putting [online].