All authors are told that they need to be on social media in order to market their books, which is unfortunately not a terrible bit of advice, but something I’ve noticed a lot lately that is becoming a problem is when the author becomes the main character. Now, I’m not talking about self-insert characters. I’m talking about the idea of marketing one’s self as the author and the issues that arise when an author uses their story to market their books.

If you aren’t an author who has tried to figure out how the algorithms on Instagram or Tiktok work, you may not be aware that a common adage nowadays is to “stop selling and start storytelling” in order to sell a product or a brand. We see this in more subtle ways, like people saying something like, “We’re a woman-owned studio that came about because we couldn’t find products to suit our needs.” I don’t think this is a problem because many of us want to support small businesses owned by marginalized people. The problem comes when the product takes a backseat to the author’s story, especially when the author weaponizes their marginalizations in order to simultaneously play victim and hero to dodge accountability or side-step any sort of authenticity.

Recently, I have been absolutely hooked on the videos LauraRaeSays makes on Youtube. Most of these are about book drama ranging from shady book boxes to authors behaving badly and book conventions that screwed over authors. Two poorly behaved authors she has recently covered, Milo Winter and P*ul C*stle (replace the * with an a because his fans harass everyone who speaks negatively of him), made me start thinking about the problems that occur when an author stops behaving like a real person and starts treating their life and career like they’re on their own version of the hero’s journey.

If you want to know more about Winter or Castle, there are plenty of videos online to watch, but the basics that you need to know is that both are disabled and queer (in different ways) and both use their stories of success and setbacks to sell their books to their large audiences. This mindset of “use your story to sell” is driven by video-based algorithms because those algorithms tend to boost chattier videos of a certain length that feature conventionally attractive white people (yes, the algorithms are racist, surprise, surprise) especially if they are also selling products from the site’s shop. I’d like to use these two men as case studies in how becoming the story goes wrong.

Castle is the author of several children’s books that revolve around queer characters and acceptance. You may have seen videos from his husband’s account, which often have him [lovingly] pranking Castle who is blind (it’s obvious he is in on it). Castle uses his platform to sell his picture books through the Tiktok shop. The biggest issue I take with his use of his platform is how he often talks about things before they are set in stone, and when he has to backtrack, he will sometimes fib, exaggerate, or misrepresent details in order to create a better story. I often tell my creative writing students that fiction has to make more sense than reality, and the way Castle spins the things that happen to him, especially the negative ones, often feel like he’s trying to make a more cohesive story rather than saying, “Well, shit happens.” An example of this is when an order of his books from a bookshop was canceled seemingly at random. He called it “a book ban” when the bookshop said buying his books this way was a mistake from a previous employee and that it went against store policy. He tried to spin this as homophobic (without saying it was homophobic but playing up the queer elements of his book as he spoke about the book being rejected) rather than stating that the store wasn’t willing to order a very large quantity of books on consignment from an indie author.

This sharing of his story and so much of his life has also created a fan base that is more than willing to swarm anyone they believe to be an enemy of Castle. The sharing of the “story” and intimate details of his life creates a very parasocial audience that isn’t willing to question holes or exaggerations in his story. Through the self-mythology he spins on Tiktok, Castle is simultaneously a victim and the hero, though I’m sure he’d call himself an underdog. He is a gay, disabled man who is writing popular children’s books that get “banned” and fighting big publishing by doing so on his own. He’s a hero when things are going well, but the second things don’t go to plan, even if they aren’t objectively bad, he pivots to pity marketing where he can be a hero and a success again if his audience buys his books or supports his posts in his time of need, whether that’s a due to a bookstore hiccup or his own incompetence. No matter what, it is always some outside enemy rather than anything he is responsible for. This perpetual cycle between hero and victim drives the narrative forward and plays up the push-pull of the algorithm.

Milo Winter has followed a very similar trajectory, but instead of being a gay, disabled man, he was a queer wunderkind, a neurodivergent writing prodigy with a six figure business. Initially, Milo started with pity marketing where he talked about how he has been trying to publish a book he had been writing for over ten years, that his agent had dumped him, and that he desperately needed a post to go viral in order for him to publish his book. Once preorders started rolling in, he hard-pivoted to being a boss with a six figure business, a dozen employees, and a story that would become multimedia. Milo’s story, unlike Castle’s, ends up abruptly hitting the wall after his book came out to horrible reviews regarding the quality. If we do a post-mortem on Milo’s self-mythology, we can see how, much like Castle’s, it shifted from hero to victim and back again to drive engagement.

The problem for Milo arose when his self-mythology collided hard with reality in a way that his audience couldn’t overlook. He portrayed himself as a child prodigy writer who had over ten years of publishing experience, but in reality, he knew nothing to the point that he didn’t know what he didn’t know until he repeatedly put his foot in it with his book release. As Milo leaned deeper into the hero’s journey, that he was rising from the ashes of being a nobody as preorders flowed in, he started to fib and exaggerate in order to maintain the mythology of being that hero. Suddenly, his agent hadn’t dumped him; he had ghosted them in favor of self-publishing. His book wasn’t bad; readers just didn’t get it or were haters. The moment his self-mythology started to falter, he swung into victim-mode where everything that went wrong wasn’t his fault. His bad reviews were his editors’ fault, a random author on Tiktok’s fault, the fault of his readers for preordering so many books to the point that he spent all his time mailing bookmarks instead of editing. At no point could Milo ever acknowledge that he was the problem and that he did wrong because it ran counter to the narrative he created.

In the case of Winter and Castle, self-mythologizing led to a rejection of accountability and responsibility if it didn’t fit with the self-image they had in their head. Milo can’t take responsibility for his crappy book because that creates dissonance in his mind with the child prodigy writer and business owner he sees himself as. Castle can’t acknowledge that his fibs and exaggerations cause harm when his audience lashes out the people they believe to be responsible because he’s a marginalized man who is fighting to not be a perpetual victim, and he is a nice person. A nice person would never do that. To acknowledge that would be to accept blame.

The problem with self-mythologizing is that it is a myth. It isn’t their reality or even a curated version of their life for social media. It is a story they created for the purpose of marketing themselves and their work, and because it is a story, it has to have a villain, conflict, and the rise and fall of a hero’s journey. If the story gets messy or the hero looks less than heroic, then life must bend for the narrative lest the illusion be broken. We all know that what we see on social media is at least life with the dull bits excluded or shined up, but self-mythologizing takes it even further. It requires a deeper change to the person’s sense of self, one that I think goes deeper than just curation. For it to work and to be successful, I think the person self-mythologizing has to believe it on some level, which is why they reject accountability or anything that runs counter to the myth they have created. They cannot handle the cognitive dissonance reality creates, so they cling harder to the myth they have built around themselves. They can be victims (or underdogs as they would frame it) because heroes have to rise from the ashes, and by leaning into victimhood, they can have an even greater rise and pay-off for their audience. What they can’t be is the villain because villains cannot become heroes, and heroes cannot become villains.

Every human being is a mixed bag of good and bad, and self-mythologizing, much like fiction, requires things to make sense and to be clear cut, which isn’t how reality works. Reality is complicated, messy, and often, uninteresting. As much as I don’t want to blame everything on Protestantism’s shadow over US society, I do wonder how much of self-mythologizing is finding order in chaos by framing life as a predestined narrative where every bad thing is something to overcome, like in the hero’s journey. Without that framing, the bad things that happen are meaningless or causeless or they might be something that cannot be overcome through audience participation or manipulation.

In completely eschewing reality in favor of narrative, writers run the risk of turning themselves into someone who is incapable of taking responsibility or embracing the complexities of life. If you flatten yourself into a character, you lose your ability to grow, and much like a ship, it is much harder to stop if you have built yourself up to a titanic level. By the time they put the brakes on and try to change, it’s too late. People have realized they’re a fraud and are far less likely to be understanding of their lies and exaggerations. People understand that life is complicated and not always fair. What they don’t understand is why someone would lie to them repeatedly, and once the cracks in the myth show, it’s too late.