Trying to be ethical in the age of Meta

I write this knowing full-well that Goodreads is owned by Bezos.

This is the issue, I think. Nowhere is ethical, and more to the point, now we KNOW about it. This IS the Bad Place, etc.

So whilst I'm going to be keeping this Goodreads page, as the blog is basically my 'website' as it were, and I'm very established here having been here since 2013 if I recall, I am going to delete my Instagram.

I dutifully created that Instagram in an effort to 'make an effort' to promote my work. It's been a mixed bag. It's been great to reach out to other authors and reviewers, and I've made contact with reviewers through there who otherwise wouldn't have seen my work, and in my experience, it's wonderful reviewers who mostly drive sales for indies like myself who have no budget for marketing and don't even sell on Amazon.

That said, my Instagram reach has remained minimal, I don't really enjoy updating it (sorry! I'm old!) and the new Meta policies negatively targeting minorities is making me want to get as far away from them as possible.

Honestly, I was going to look into transferring this account to Storygraph instead too, but then found out that Storygraph uses Gen AI, so. What can you do, huh? Everything is problematic now. So I'm cutting myself a break and keeping this Goodreads blog.

If you followed me on Instagram, I'll miss you. If you'd consider giving me a follow on Bluesky, I'm johntfuller over there.