What I Don’t Know:

I will rehearse before dancing, but don’t expect Beyonce.

By Thio Isobel Moss

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What I don’t know is hurting me.

In my recent post about Audaciter Press, I mentioned wanting to build credibility before fully launching its publishing and marketing tools. When the time comes, we’ll start small—but credibility is exactly what’s concerning me now.

One piece of advice for new authors appears everywhere: don’t try to do everything. Pick a few platforms and be consistent instead of burning yourself out trying to be everywhere at once.

So I did.

On X, I lucked out. Another author took notice of my account early on, liking and reposting some of my posts, and we started supporting each other’s work. That helped immensely.

But I am not social-media savvy. This week has made that abundantly clear.

Something finally shifted with my Instagram feed, and suddenly I’m seeing more bookstagram creators, ARC campaigns, and author marketing content. My head is buzzing trying to absorb all of it.

One creator in particular, Olivia Snow’s Instagram, caught my attention. She talked about using Instagram ads to promote ARCs and getting results that still feel wildly out of reach for me.

But instead of discouraging me, it lit a fire under my butt.

I’ll be honest: learning new tech skills overwhelms me. I panic-quit every ten minutes for an hour, then force myself back in to tackle the least frightening piece of the problem. Somehow, using this highly scientific method, I’ve managed to build a website, become semi-competent on X and Instagram, and figure out both Amazon Ads and BookBub ads.

I thought I was doing pretty well.

Then I learned my Instagram account was still set up more like a personal account than a professional one. I knew my reach was abysmal, but I didn’t fully understand why. I’d been treating the platform casually, browsing whatever interested me and posting without much strategy.

That’s changing now.

For the first time, I’m boosting a post. I’m learning hashtags properly. I’m using Canva to make reels. I’m studying what successful authors and reviewers are actually doing instead of assuming I understand the game.

And now I’m on a bigger mission.

I don’t want to become someone who writes a couple of books and assumes they understand publishing. I want to learn this industry from the ground up—the marketing, the audience-building, the mistakes, the experiments, the failures, and the occasional breakthroughs.

I want to share what works, what doesn’t, and what I wish I’d known sooner.

And yes, apparently this means I’m going on TikTok. I’ll do the dance. We’ll all suffer together. I would like to learn to shuffle, but it ain’t going to be pretty!

But the reason matters to me.

I want Audaciter Press to become something genuinely useful for indie authors and future clients. Right now, I have an opportunity to learn with my own books—to test strategies, explore platforms, and figure out how different audiences actually discover stories.

Maybe I’ll never become a TikTok sensation. Maybe my knees will file a formal complaint before that happens.

But I’m done pretending I already know enough. I need to experiment, explore, and build trust in myself in these new spaces.

Time to learn.