FAQ 4: I have nothing to say. What am I supposed to post about?

Instagram content explained through the medium of soup

This post is part of series where I answer some of the questions I am most frequently asked about social media. To browse or read the rest of the series click here.

One summer a few years ago, I fixated on growing tomatoes. I had visions of fresh tomatoes with salads, homemade pasta sauce, and soup stashed in the freezer for when the cold days rolled around again. Yum.

Having no concept of how many tomatoes one single plant can grow, I planted SIX. I fed them, watered them, pinched out the side shoots, and brushed strange, hirsute leaves between my fingers several times a day, inhaling their peppery scent until my head throbbed.

Green bubbles swelled into shining orbs, and emeralds matured into rubies that dangled amidst the lush tangle of leaves and stems. Eventually the first harvest was ceremoniously captured on camera by my almost 8 year old daughter (who, by the way, hates tomatoes). It was fun, exciting, empowering even.

This is the only surviving photo but looookkkkk 😍

By late October I couldn’t believe the plants were still producing tomatoes. Shouldn’t they be dead by now? I huffed from my kitchen window, but it felt like sacrilege to throw them away so I carried on harvesting and blanching and boiling and blending.

When the table holding the grow-bags collapsed I quietly welcomed the opportunity to consign the whole lot to the compost heap, confident I had more soup and pasta sauce stashed in the freezer than my family would ever agree to eating.

With the help of some judicious redistribution, we did eventually empty the freezer of the tomato produce, and, while I’ll not be in a hurry to grow any more tomato plants, that autumn I learned that creating a tasty tomato soup requires more than just tomatoes.

Even homegrown-tomato soup is bland and uninspiring if that’s the only ingredient you use, but add a little olive oil, basil, salt, pepper, a tiny amount of sugar when the harvest is a little sharp, and an occasional something extra (the time I added red peppers on a whim yielded the best soup of all) and you can make a soup so delicious your family are begging for more (the first couple of times, at least).

But what does soup have to do with Instagram content?

One of the most common Instagram mistakes I see writers making is trying to make delicious, beg-worthy soup with tomatoes and tomatoes alone, if tomatoes were updates about their book/ work.

You do need updates - front cover reveals, reviews from readers, publication dates, preorder links, where to sign up to read etc - to nudge your ideal readers to buy your book (after all, what’s tomato soup without the tomatoes) but you must combine these kinds of posts with other ‘ingredients’ if your content soup is going to taste good.

Try adding these ingredients to make good content soup:

• post about the books you are reading (especially if they’re in the same niche or genre as you are writing in), behind the scenes of your writing practice and routines, other snippets of your life which can be anything that gives a taste of you as a person, without sharing more than you’re comfortable with

• post about themes and ideas that appear in your book/ writing. Your ideal reader is only your ideal reader because they’re interested in what your book is about. For example, sitting next to me on my desk right now is The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, bought because although I don’t enjoy all dystopian fiction, I am a sucker for a story that explores themes of family, womanhood, motherhood, privilege and the impact of the climate crisis (these also just happen to be the themes my own fiction project explores…;-)

• post about the content of your book/ writing because you are the ultimate insider. All writers can post about why you are writing this book, why now, and why you are the right person to do so. You can share what you hope to achieve through your book - what you want your reader to feel, think about or learn. Fiction writers can post short extracts, character dilemmas, personal stories about places or settings that feature in your book; non-fiction writers might post about your area of expertise, case studies, tools or tips your ideal reader will appreciate, interviews with experts.

Using your book/ your writing as a framework for your Instagram content increases the chances that the people who find your Instagram account are also going to be interested in your book.

And, because you are creating posts about ideas you are already familiar with, it will hopefully make content creation more sustainable and less of a drain on your creative energy.

Finally, whatever you decide to post on Instagram about, there is one thing all writers have in common: it’s inconceivable you have ‘nothing to say’.

If you’re writing/ have written an entire book and/ or a series of blog posts or newsletters, there is no way you can be suffering from an absence of ideas, you simply need to learn how to ‘package’ them for Instagram.

You simply need to learn how to make soup.

For more advice on keeping the content ideas flowing, please subscribe to this Substack. Next week’s post will cover three methods I use to generate post ideas whenever I’m feeling a bit stuck.

Next week I’m also relaunching my content inspiration workshop, SPARK! This is a 90 minute group workshop during which we work through a series of prompts to transform how you link your reader, your book/ writing, and your Instagram content so you can craft posts your ideal reader will care about. If you’d like to hear more, make sure you’re following me on Instagram .

Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash