This Is Why I Don’t Follow Authors on Instagram

*All photos in this story were taken by the author*

There are a handful of authors that I follow on Instagram, who follow me, we follow each other, we’re cool — but there have been three times as many authors that have followed me on IG and unfollowed me as soon as I followed them back.

I think it’s because these authors want to inflate their “followers to following” ratio, thus making them look like a “superstar” author that has thousands of followers while they’re only following around 50 accounts, which happen to be their friends and family. Every other follower is “a fan”.

It really annoys me when fellow authors do that, and I go ahead and unfollow them when I not that they’ve unfollowed me. I don’t want to network with these types of people. People that will give you a pound to get a pound back, and then take back the pound they gave you initially, ending up with two pounds and leaving you empty-handed.

I’m happy to follow back anyone that follows me, but not if they only followed me for a follow and plan to unfollow me as soon as I follow back. This one author actually did this four times over the course of 12 months! Four times! She probably does this so often that she forgets who caught her out. On the fourth occasion that she followed me, I didn’t follow back — I’d followed back the previous few times just to see what she’d do and she unfollowed me immediately — and what did she do when I didn’t follow back? She unfollowed me, of course!

As a result of this happening over and over with so many authors, I refrain from following back authors that follow me, and when they go on to unfollow me because I didn’t follow back, I tell myself that they weren’t interested in connecting with me so it’s fine that I lost them as a follower. Some…