After the autumn break following Omnichannel Hearts, I’m back to intensive writing mode with a project that feels both deeply personal and uncomfortably exposing. The fifth novel has a title now: The Influencer’s Canvas. It’s a story about a young artist who becomes a popular influencer and grapples with whether authentic creativity can survive the relentless pursuit of likes, shares, and algorithmic approval.
The concept emerged from months of observation within my own professional circle. Through my nail art practice, I work regularly with content creators, lifestyle bloggers, and social media personalities who’ve built substantial followings around carefully curated aesthetics. Sitting across from them while I paint their nails, I witness both their meticulously crafted public personas and the exhausted eyes that emerge when cameras stop rolling.
These sessions have become informal ethnography. Behind the ring lights and perfectly arranged props, I see people wrestling with questions that feel increasingly relevant to anyone creating in public spaces. How do you maintain artistic integrity when algorithms reward predictable content? What happens to spontaneous creativity when every moment becomes potential material for documentation?
The protagonist draws heavily from these observations, but also from my own experience as an author navigating social media promotion, book launches, and the strange vulnerability of releasing creative work into public discourse. Whether you’re painting a canvas or writing a novel, there’s that moment when your private creative process becomes public property, subject to judgment, interpretation, and commodification.
The Influencer’s Canvas explores this tension without vilifying social media culture or romanticizing pre-digital artistic purity. The story acknowledges that platforms like Instagram and TikTok have democratized creative distribution while also creating new forms of creative constraint. My protagonist learns to navigate these contradictions rather than resolve them cleanly.
The research process has been fascinating and occasionally uncomfortable. Several influencer clients have shared stories about brand partnerships that compromised their artistic vision, algorithmic changes that destroyed months of audience building, and the psychological toll of constantly performing authenticity. Their experiences inform character development in ways that feel both privileging and ethically complex.
My multilingual background from Beijing Language and Culture University and Regent’s University London provides additional narrative layers. For the first time, I’m weaving multiple languages into the text itself — English dialogue punctuated by Russian internal monologue, Mandarin social media captions, French art criticism. The linguistic code-switching reflects how identity fragments and reassembles across cultural and digital spaces.
Visual elements will also play a larger role than in previous novels. Instagram posts screenshots, mood board collages, and even QR codes linking to supplementary content. The book becomes truly multimedia, experimenting with how traditional narrative forms can incorporate contemporary communication methods without losing literary depth.
This experimental approach feels risky after four novels that followed more conventional structures. But The Influencer’s Canvas demands innovative form to match its content. How do you write authentically about influence culture using only traditional literary techniques?
The nail art work continues providing both inspiration and grounding. Creating something beautiful with my hands while discussing digital creativity with clients creates productive tension between analog craft and virtual performance. These conversations reveal how people maintain creative authenticity across multiple channels of self-expression.
Writing about influencer culture while actively participating in social media promotion creates its own ethical complications. Am I observing or exploiting? Critiquing or participating? The novel grapples with these questions directly rather than maintaining false authorial distance.
I’m hoping you’ll embrace this experimental approach when The Influencer’s Canvas launches next year. The multilingual elements and visual components represent my most ambitious formal experiment yet, drawing on everything I’ve learned about cultural translation, digital communication, and multimedia storytelling.
For now, I’m deep in the revision process, balancing authentic character development with innovative narrative techniques. The canvas is taking shape, pixel by pixel and word by word.
Posted from London, where every creative act becomes performance whether you intend it or not.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
