Let's Make "Set It and Forget It" Social Media Pages That Boost Your Writing Career and Don't Drain Your Soul

The Forever Workshop Community Corner — 4.23.25

Apr 23, 2025

Hey, I’m Shelby!

I’m one of the founders of Chill Subs and manage The Forever Workshop and our social media presence. Honestly, since we brought on Jo it doesn’t even feel right to say the first bit, she does so much here wow fuck wow.

Since she’s been pouring her heart and soul into her workshop this month, it seemed like a good time to do a community corner takeover and talk about some pretty significant shifts happening in the social media side of the writing industry right now.

First, I’ll cover what those shifts are.

Then, we’ll create a high-conversion social media bio that funnels folks off of the apps and to your website/newsletter/magazine/tinder — wherever you want em’.

WTF Is Going On with Social Media?

I recently attended a CLMP webinar giving social media guidance to writers and an overwhelming majority of folks were interested in getting their followers off of their social media accounts and onto their mailing lists. This “own vs rent” your audience thing isn’t new, but with the state of social media being what it is I get the urgency.

A quick breakdown of the socialshitscape in 2025:

AI has made it easy to produce a massive amount of content and bot accounts
The apps are strongly prioritizing paid content and advertisements
Short form video content is dominating
A new social media app comes out every day

What This Means for Writers

Good things, actually. (haha I know can you beleive it.) The implosion of the internet has made analog entertainment more appealing and the pinnacle of analog entertainment is… well, books.

I’ve noticed an uptick in popular creators outside of the literary niche talking about reading to fix their attention spans and the overall collective conciousness seems to be arriving at “hey it’s gross here”.

You should still be on social media, but you should feel significantly less pressure to be a “content creator” on these apps because with the current state of them unless you go REALLY HARD — the results will be minimal at best. Your time is better spent writing.

How to Show Up in 2025

Even if people begin to spend less time on socials, they’re deeply integrated in society and here to stay. It’s likely that they will pivot to more of a search engine role.

For discoverability and networking purposes, I recommend creating professional profiles across as many platforms as possible,1 but treating them as landing pages, so to speak.

This will allow you to post content and status updates when/if you want to, but their main purpose is a passive way to funnel people to your work.

Turning your social media profile into a landing page is pretty easy. It comes down to making the most out of these three components:

Username → Make it as close to your real name as possible
Profile Picture → Should be crystal clear, with your face occupying 60-70% of the image
Bio / link in bio → This one is nuanced and also the most important, so let’s workshop it….

Let’s Create a High-Conversion Social Media Bio

Alrighty, the goal here is to give a brief overview of who you are, what you write, and where people can go to find your work. Extra points for being creative and sprinkling in a bit of personality. Minus points for cliches and too many emojis.

I’ll break it down into 5 steps using the late Sylvia Plath as an example — who would’ve hated social media but appreciated meme culture and you’ll never convince me otherwise.

Step 1: Briefly cover who you are and what you write

Examples:

Poet and novelist
Confessional poet. Fiction writer.

Step 2 : Fold in themes you write about and your unique angle:

Examples:

Navigating the waters between motherhood, marriage, and art in a world that demands women choose.
Writing at the intersection of feminine rage and vulnerability.

Step 3: Impossible to ignore CTA

Okay, this part is really important and can be a little tedious but it will be well worth your time, I promise.

Copy and paste this at the tail end of your bio:

→ 📖 my work ⤵ ←

We’re going to cover your “link in bio” next, and that is where the arrow will be pointing to. It is imperative that you direct people off of this profile and toward your writing, and the clearer you spell it out for them, the more likely they are to take action. The reason I say this part can be tedious is just because you want to make sure that the arrow lines up with the link in a way that makes sense, like this:

Step 4: (Optional) If you do fancy writer things, work them in

Some fancy writer things:

Books or pieces you've published and where people can read them
Represented by an agent
An editor or a reader for a magazine
You work in an industry-adjacent company
Awards, fellowships, or grants received (even smaller, regional ones)
Residency programs completed or upcoming
MFA or other writing-specific degrees
Writer-in-residence positions (at schools, libraries, etc.)
Teaching positions related to writing (workshops, university courses)
Notable anthologies your work has appeared in
Number of publications
Membership in professional writing organizations (AWP, PEN, etc.)
Translation of your work into other languages
Writing column or regular contribution to a publication
Founder/organizer of a writing group or literary event

And If you do these fancy writer things at fancy writer places, tag them. Being affiliated will automatically establish authority.

For these examples l’ll use alive people that did a good job:

These ladies nailed it. Their profile pictures and usernames are perfect too.

Step 5: The almighty link in bio

Most social media platforms allow you to include a link on your profile — use this to send people to see all of your writing in one place.2 You can link your personal writer website if you have one, and if you don’t, you can create a free writing portfolio on Chill Subs and link that.

My boi Nikiti designed these. They’re a beautiful, simplistic place you can plug all of your work into so when you want to flex on people that you’re a writer, it's easy.

Step 6: Share your bio below

If you’d like feedback on your bio, pop it in the comments. Also, I’m not as good at this as Jo so you’re probably going to have questions — feel free to ask those too! Thank you so, so much for being here.

The Forever Workshop