FRUSTRATED, INCORPORATED

I'm so tired of watching other people get ahead for no reason

We interrupt your usual garbage fire to talk about something else that matters a lot to me, which is my book (aka the real reason this Substack exists).

My very well-meaning mother sent me this gift article from the New York Fishwrap Times this morning. I’m used to the shitty clickbait headlines, but this one is especially terrible because it absolutely buries the lede.

A JOURNAL. A “shadow work” JOURNAL.

A journal is something to be written in. Keila Shaheen—and yes, my brain keeps transposing her name as “Sheila Kaheen”—wrote “a slim volume” full of prompts for people to then fill in their answers. I keep mentally going back to the workbooks full of busywork we were issued in the third grade, and I wonder if this one comes with an already-sharpened No. 2 pencil.

My issue isn’t whether or not you believe “shadow work” is real—and oh how so many people on TikTok obviously do—it’s that a workbook went viral, she got an agent, and now she’s passively raking in millions of dollars while others promote her workbook for her.

How she managed to hook people by tapping into their deepest darkest fears is beyond me, and I also don’t see profiting off of fear and misery or other potentially self-harming thoughts as being “successful.”

I make videos on TikTok all the time about my rock and roll love story, The Sound of Settling, all the time. They never get more than 200 or so views, even though I have just slightly over 6000 followers there. Even when I use the “#Booktok” and other hashtags for the book lovers there, I still haven’t gotten the kind of boost that launched Colleen Hoover into the stratosphere.

(Hoover’s success story is marred by the widespread criticism for her sequels, so she’s not the shining example she once was, just FYI)

You’d think my Dave Grohl backstory and the universal blurb from Cameron Crowe would be enough to land me an agent, but I just keep racking up AI rejections that make it clear my submission never actually reached a human.

By now I think I’ve made it clear that, between the responses to my political tweets and the reviews for The Sound of Settling, I’m an untapped writing goldmine with a built-in audience that includes a lot of big deal famous people.

I have over 4K followers on Facebook and almost 112K Twitter followers, but thanks to Elon suppressing me, my book tweets never get the kind of engagement I need them to. And there are over 1K subscribers who are getting this Substack, so this is where you all come in.

It costs nothing to make a post on your socials boosting my beloved book. Feel free to cut and paste: “My friend Tara Dublin wrote a great book called THE SOUND OF SETTLING that you need to add to your TBR lists ASAP!”

Once I get my proper publishing deal and the option to adapt my beloved book into a streaming series, you’ll be able to brag that you were into my stuff before I got big! Good people deserve good things, so let’s make something extra good happen together.

@taradublinrocks#thesoundofsettling #signtara #bookreviews #booktok #booktoker taradublinrocks.com

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