The craft (and business) of TikTok storytelling, according to author Jason Pargin

Author Jason Pargin didn’t set out to become a star on TikTok. In fact, he never wanted people to even know his name, let alone what he looked like. He launched his writing career during the halcyon days of the World Wide Web, using a pseudonym to publish books like “John Dies At The End” (made into a movie starring Paul Giamatti) and the New York Times bestseller, “This Book is Full of Spiders.” Later, he became the Executive Editor of Cracked.com, the satirical site known for bizarre trivia, comics, and acerbic humor.

But in 2025, Pargin is one of TikTok's (and Facebook’s) most reliable sources for videos about funny, interesting, or weird factoids and stories. His short storytelling clips about the famous photo of Muhammad Ali’s phantom punch on Sonny Liston, or an unfinished obelisk in Egypt have garnered him over a half a billion views and sustained his writing career. His most recent book, “I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom,” owes at least some of its success to Pargin’s presence on various social media platforms. But he still wishes he didn’t have to show his face on camera to sell books. 

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you transition from being a writer to being on-camera?

My career follows the technology as it developed. I graduated high school in 1993, the technology existed, but there was not an internet you could go browse at that time. So when I graduated college, I got a degree in journalism. I went into journalism, was very bad at it, and lasted like a year and a half in that.

In 1997 or so, we got our first internet connection, and I found out that you can just type stuff and it appears and that other people have to read it. It was like, “Oh, okay, here's the thing I was born for, because there's no oversight and I can be weird.” So I started writing, started blogging — before that word existed — they were just websites.

How did you get into TikTok?

In 2022, finally, every single person around me was saying, “Look, you go to the bookstore, there's a shelf that's called ‘BookTok.’ What they're talking about is on TikTok. That's where there are all these influencers who talk about their favorite books, and that's how books are now sold.” You kind of have to get on board with that, or just slowly be forgotten as your elderly fan base dies out. 

Before I started watching it, I thought it was entirely young people. I thought it was like teenage girls just lip syncing to songs. And people tried to tell me, “Oh, no, like Hank Green is on there. There's science content, there’s people doing one- or two- or three-minute-long bits on some interesting facts, like, that's the stuff you could do.” I mean, that's what Cracked was. We would do these interesting lists of well researched — hopefully — subjects that were boiled down into a digestible, funny format.

So in 2022, for the first time in my life, I downloaded TikTok. I watched it just as a user for about six weeks trying to understand the format, how it worked. I was posting up to four videos a day, just trying different stuff and seeing, first of all, can I get away with not showing my face? And the answer at that time was no. The algorithm demanded you be on camera. 

I was very fortunate, because it turned out I had a knack for it, I guess. But that was very much a surprise to me. I never dreamed of being somebody who people would recognize on the street, right? I didn't want to get famous. I wanted the work to be famous, to be clear.

How did you flop? And how did you make the switch to figure out what works?

The funny thing about TikTok is you can kind of tell right away whether or not it likes a video, because it has a specific method where, even if you just joined that day, it will roll your video out to a group of people, and that is basically a focus group. It may be 100 users or whatever, if they kept watching it most of the way, if one of them shared it or whatever, then they will show it to about 2000 people, then they will keep expanding. And so you can know within 15 minutes if a video, if there's something to it. 

There was one early one that was a very big hit where I was explaining that if you are supervising or working with creative people, that a lot of their work doesn't look like work because the act of sitting around and waiting to have an idea or trying to work through something appears to be them staring at a wall. But that video, I had just gotten off the treadmill, so I was sweaty, and my hair was a mess. I just sat down and turned my camera on, just gave this thought, and it becomes the first, probably, like, six-figure-digit hit. And that was when I realized, “Oh, the barrier to being good at this is actually lower than what I thought.”

Let me also say because there are people [reading] this who’ll notice me omitting something huge, which is that the way social media platforms treat men and women is very different. The comments [women] will [receive] if they change their hair or wear an outfit that people don't like is kind of disgusting. They're an author. They're on there trying to get you to buy their book. No one cares what I look like. There may be like one joke if my hair is not combed that day, but I don't necessarily even brush my hair before getting on camera.

I watch women authors, and they are having to do their hair, they are having to be, like, filming their vacation. They're at an exotic location. They're doing that because the algorithm has said you need to. 

And then they will buy your book if they think you're living a beautiful, interesting lifestyle. It is a totally different playing field, and I hate everything about it.

I try very, very hard to follow many authors on TikTok, and most of them are women. I re-boost their posts, if they ask me for blurbs, I try very hard to support women authors as much as I can.

Your topics are so wide-ranging and change all the time. What’s your process for coming up with the topics?

That's kind of my whole career, like I went into journalism because I was somebody who just loved to read and research things and love trivia and love news, and I was somebody who before the internet existed, I had piles of magazines in my house and newspapers. Once you're doing that as your job, that's all you do all day long. You're looking around for something interesting, and you have some question about how the world works. And then that becomes a video. So if I were trying to teach somebody else how to do it, I don't know that I could, unless that person was naturally curious themselves.

How do you make your videos? Do you write a script? Do you have minions? 

I have no staff at all helping me with any of the 11 various platforms I have to maintain to keep my life going as an author, it's all me. Now, the only reason I don't write out a script for my videos is because I'm not good at reading a script for my videos. You'd be able to tell I was reading. So I have notes that are like the points I'm going to hit, or the the facts that I've got to put in there, if I'm going to cite statistics or whatever, I've got to have those written down make sure I'm not saying it wrong. 

You can film and edit in the app. It takes me about two hours start to finish to get a video done. And you can spend two hours filming, after having spent multiple hours researching it, and then within 15 minutes, you'll see if TikTok has decided to kill it because they don't like the subject matter or something, and instantly that effort will all be wasted.

What are your biggest hits, and why do you think they're big?

It's weird, because you'll have a video that's just pointing out some extremely crazy fact or some extremely stupid joke to the point that not even I understand why it was supposed to be funny, but that's kind of the way this always has worked. There’ll be something that just caught people.

There [are] others where I made it just to amuse myself, and it became a pretty big hit, like that one about the movie “The Town.” I said that there was this enduring mystery where people were trying to figure out what city it took place in. If you've seen that movie, the whole thing is just Boston, Boston, Boston, Boston. Every five seconds everybody in the movie is wearing like a Boston Celtics jersey. They're always in front of some Boston landmark. 

So I just had these screenshots from the movie behind me, and was doing this very serious analysis, like “Nobody can figure out where this thing was filmed, and that people, for a decade, people have been desperately trying to and they've been so tight-lipped about it.” 

How do you find your videos translate to Instagram or YouTube? You post across all of these other platforms, right?

I have far greater reach on Facebook than anywhere else because I've monetized that Facebook account. Facebook pays me three times more than TikTok does, and I have half the follower count there, of all of the social media platforms. Of all the social media platforms, the one that's growing fastest is Facebook, and we think of that as like the old folks home for a bunch of AI slop and old paranoid people. TikTok has been shrinking in its user base for years. That's one of the problems with it. It's never been profitable, and its user base has been shrinking, especially with all the threats of it being banned.

So at this point, this is how you make a living?

Well, I'm a full-time author, in theory, I should be making a living doing that, but I have monetized the video stuff because it's such an absurd usage of time and energy, to the point that, yeah, most of my income now — a little more than half of it — comes from posting to social media. 

What is the most you made off of one video?

You'll see people say, “Well, I've heard you can make $1 per 1,000 views.” TikTok basically has a cap, and then once you reach that, they reduce the amount per view down to below one cent. So I think the most I've ever made off of one video, a mega-viral video probably was like $2,000 but typical revenue for a video is something closer to, like, $15.

So the main reason you started doing this was to get your written work out to the world. Has that worked?

It has. I mean, this kind of saved my author career, if we're being frank. The most recent book that I put out, it overwhelmingly sold because I relentlessly pushed it on TikTok. But what TikTok demands is about 100 times greater than what the average person thinks in terms of trying to promote something. So if I make a video about my book where I'm reading an excerpt or otherwise talking about some subjects, and I'm going to tie it into the book, for about every 2,000 views to the video, I'll sell one copy of the book. So the video gets 40,000 views, I can expect to sell about 20 copies. If it’s just a piece of trivia and I don't mention the book at all, it's just me as TikTok guy, I'll sell about one copy for every million views. And those sound like hopeless numbers for somebody trying to sell their book on TikTok. 

But this is the thing. I made TikTok my full-time job. My split is about 80/20 or 85/15: 85% promotion, 15% writing the book. So my job as a full-time author, my job is not writing books, my job is selling books. And I'm someone who has a traditional publishing deal. I'm somebody who has been on The New York Times bestseller list. I'm somebody who's had a film made from a book that was a cult hit and sold a lot of books. I've sold film rights and TV rights to everything I've ever written. And even then, no matter what the publisher does, no matter how much work their publicity person does in terms of getting the book out to reviewers, that kind of thing, 95% of the promotion has to be done by me, because what people want is me. They want to hear from me. 

The amount of work and energy required to sell enough books to make a middle-class income off of it is, frankly absurd, and most people can't do it because they don't have that time and energy. 

What does your day look like? What part of the day do you actually set aside to write?

It’s not exactly a nine-to-five day. I'll get up in the morning. I'll look at how yesterday’s stuff performed. I'll check to see if I've got warnings or copyright strikes, all of that other administrative stuff that nobody knows about until they start doing it and realizing how time consuming it is. There's always emails from somebody, the publisher, my editor or my agent, something about deals we're talking about, or numbers that have come in, or something just the business side of the business. And then by afternoon, I've usually settled on what I want my video to be about. And then I usually can sit down and and make it and then hopefully by 5 or 6 p.m. all that other stuff is done. I could sit down and start writing on the book or editing the book after dinner. I'm not somebody who can just write a novel in between emails. So the evenings are dedicated to writing the book.

What advice do you give to aspiring creators or journalists?

There's no trick to it, because any trick I gave you would be irrelevant six months from now. It demands an incredible time investment, and that's it. It's kind of the same advice if you ask somebody who is extremely physically fit, or if you ask somebody who is a great at investing, they've gotten very wealthy from investing, they can give you tips that might sound like shortcuts. In reality, that investor makes money because they think about investing all day and all night, and this is what consumes them. 

This audience I have now is by orders of magnitude bigger, far bigger, than any of the audience I had in my blogging years, far bigger than any novel I've ever written, far bigger than any article I've ever written, anything I've done in the world of podcasting — having my face on camera saying these things is much, much, much bigger. I have over half a billion views on that TikTok channel alone. And that's now not my biggest platform. I have 1.3 million followers across all the different platforms that are together. And here's the thing, when the audience goes away, I won't know why then, either.

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Tricia Romano is the author of the critically acclaimed oral history about the Village Voice, “The Freaks Came Out To Write,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. She lives in Seattle.