X profile analytics
David Perell (@david_perell) X analytics
@david_perell
"The Writing Guy" | Christian | Host: How I Write Podcast | I tweet about writing, beauty, and architecture | My writing: https://t.co/SOE9HtxXdi
@david_perell has 480.8K followers, a median of 25.3K views per post and a 1.09% engagement rate.
Based on 13 recent original posts (medium confidence). Updated October 7, 2026.
At a glance
Key stats
- Followers
- 480.8K
- Median views per post
- 25.3K
- Average views per post
- 128.3K
- Engagement rate (by views)
- 1.09%
- Original posts per week
- 1.9
- Average engagements per post
- 1,403
Engagement grade
Developing
This is near the lower benchmark range for accounts with 100K-1M followers.
Profile score
78/100
- Profile completeness100
- Audience shape100
- Engagement25
- Consistency67
- Positioning clarity100
Monetization
Estimated X creator earnings
$0–$0 in the last 30 days
From 31.7K views on @david_perell's original posts in the last 30 days.
Rewards eligibility: likely
Rough estimate. X publishes no payout rate, so this assumes about $5–12 per 1M original-post impressions from reported creator payouts. Only Premium viewers’ impressions count, so real payouts can be much lower.
Free report
How does your account compare with @david_perell?
Get the same report for your own account by email: engagement grade, median views, best times to post and estimated earnings.
Growth
Follower growth
Tracked by Xholic since August 1, 2026.
Timing
Best times to post
When @david_perell's recent posts performed best (UTC).
- #1 slot
8:07 PM
Monday · UTC
- #2 slot
8:23 PM
Tuesday · UTC
- #3 slot
8:34 PM
Wednesday · UTC
What worked
Top recent posts
- 01
@david_perell ·
The decline of beauty in everyday life shows up in even the smallest things, like tickets, where we’ve let our obsession with efficiency win out over personality and artistic expression. Like the ticket from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which I've shared in the first photo. It's an iconic building that could have so easily inspired a beautiful ticket design, but they opted for the most economical option instead. Each example of this decline isn't a big deal, but the world becomes less charming and enchanted when people stop caring about craftsmanship. For some alternatives, scroll through the photos. The second one shows old Japanese train tickets, the third one shows an old circus ticket, and the fourth one is a World Series ticket from 2002, which felt magical when I got to hold one as an eight-year-old. So yes, there’s definitely been a decline. And maybe we’re okay with it! But it’s worth remembering that this decline isn’t inevitable. There is another way.
Photo on the original post- 151Replies
- 1.1KReposts
- 10.1KLikes
- 793.8KViews
5.6x average engagementHas an imageLong post (over 200 characters)Posted Wed 21:00 UTC - 02
@david_perell ·
R.F. Kuang has written seven books, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and trained at some of the world's top universities: Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale. Her wisdom-per-word ratio is also off the charts. Some highlights from our conversation: 1) Emotions are like colors. Mix them! Emotions are never one-dimensional. Bring together fear and courage, love and revulsion, joy and panic. This collision of feelings is closer to how emotion actually works. 2) Practice literary shapeshifting. Become a new person, a new persona, and a new type of author with every project. Do not confuse your habitual voice with your authentic voice: there is no single way of constructing sentences that must define you. Treat language as a fluid and flexible tool. 3) There's no correlation between how good writing feels in the moment and the quality of the product. We mistake effortlessness for genius, flow, or divine inspiration. So don't evaluate a day’s work by the pleasure of producing it. Judge whether the sentences escaped your pre-existing patterns and helped you think something through. 4) Good writing comes from being attentive to what's happening around you and writing with specificity about those observations, rather than relying on the theoretical. Throughout the day, ask: “Where is this feeling sitting in my body? How am I physically responding to this?” Those questions force you beyond the abstract label and toward something more specific than the reader could easily imagine for themselves. 5) Use your zero draft to discover the beating heart of the story, not to prove that you can already write it. Research, brainstorm, follow your nose, and collect whatever feels surprising or “crunchy.” At this stage, coherence is less valuable than emotional resonance. 6) Draft in layers. Let the early draft remain “balls on sticks.” Add the setting, architecture, faces, furniture, and drape colors in later passes. A person’s visual appearance is often the least interesting thing about them. 7) Use the outsider’s perspective to make language strange again. Nabokov could play, stretch, and innovate with English because he was fascinated by the oddities and opportunities of particular word combinations. 8) Be suspicious of “volunteer words for volunteer thoughts.” Volunteer words are the phrases that offer themselves immediately because they are already floating around in your head. They repeat common discourse and carry ideas that are easy to digest; you are filling the page from your pre-existing dataset rather than articulating something you have actually observed or thought through. 9) If you're stuck, put the subconscious to work. Open a blank document, type a title, word, or phrase, then save and close it. Return after the problem has had time to work on you in the background. 10) Serious writing doesn't require solemnity. Soaring observations about history or human nature can sit beside potty jokes. 11) AI can offer readily available words for readily available thoughts, but readily available thoughts do not push boundaries. It may reproduce impressive human patterns, but “you won’t get your next Pale Fire from an LLM.” 12) Thinking about the audience as you write a first draft is a death sentence. The moment you start writing while looking over your shoulder, you stop taking the story where it needs to go. Timestamps: 0:29 Writing your emotions 6:44 Observing people 15:20 Why easy writing doesn't work 23:09 Building unique voices for each book 30:47 What Kuang learned from debate 32:52 Why primary sources matter 35:33 AI & writing 40:54 How to start a book 45:16 Trust your subconscious 50:25 Copy the writers you love 52:57 Being goofy 57:34 Find a driving question 1:01:36 What every writer needs to learn 01:04:38 Book and movie recommendations I've shared the full conversation with R.F. Kuang below. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube, or listen to it all on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!
Video on the original post- 40Replies
- 305Reposts
- 2.6KLikes
- 565KViews
5.1x average engagementHas a videoLong post (over 200 characters)Posted Wed 17:00 UTC - 03
@david_perell ·
Harlan Coben is the master of the plot twist. He's published 35 novels and sold more than 100 million books. This conversation is all about how he writes. Here are the highlights: 1) Keep enough fear to stop yourself from phoning it in. He says: "Every writer I know who thinks they’re really good actually sucks." 2) Write your first draft knowing nobody gets to see how bad it is. This is your chance to break every writing rule because nobody's going to read what you wrote 3) How do you create suspense? By answering questions, then making the answers open bigger questions. 4) Write dialogue people would want to overhear. Ask yourself: “If I were sitting at a pub, is this the conversation I would want to overhear?” If the answer is no, make it better. 5) Give your dialogue a reason to happen: Don’t just put two people in a pub and have them talk. Imagine someone has keeled over, or a fight has broken out, and they’re debating whether to intervene. Now the conversation has a purpose. 6) Start in the middle, where there’s already a story happening. Don’t have your character walk into the church, sit down, and notice the flowers. Put him in the back pew watching the only woman he’ll ever love marry another man. Now we’re engaged. 7) Find the one detail that brings the whole scene to life: A group of mystery writers once debated the scariest sound in the world. Warren Murphy said: you’re alone in a cabin in the woods, and upstairs, you hear the toilet flush. That’s the moment you’re looking for. 8) Make room for quiet, or your loud moments won’t mean anything. If your story is always storming, a rainstorm won’t matter. Think of a placid pond: a small rock makes a ripple. But throw a boulder in a churning ocean, and nobody will notice. 9) Know your ending so you can afford to get lost along the way. Harlan says: "I know I’m driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles. I might take a detour through the Panama Canal and stop in Tokyo, but I know where I’m going. That gives me freedom. I can go off the main road because there’s a destination in the GPS. Knowing the ending lets me explore more without panicking that I’m completely lost." 10) Don't tell people what you're writing before you finish it. If you're at a cocktail party and start explaining your book, you'll almost feel the air coming out of the balloon. You'll get satisfaction without doing the work when all your satisfaction should be coming from finishing the book. 11) Don't expect to be good when you start writing: Harlan's first published novel was the fourth he'd written. You could have the skill of LeBron James, but if you’ve never played basketball, you’re going to suck when you get on that court. Why would writing be different? — — Timestamps: 0:34 How to find your next idea 4:02 Know your ending first 10:21 Why talent isn’t enough 13:45 Only bad writers think they’re good 18:30 What keeps Harlan going 23:47 Books vs TV adaptations 28:48 The mistake most writers make 35:06 What makes for good dialogue 43:08 Your themes find you 47:39 What he learned from Hitchcock 57:01 Making the boring parts interesting 59:58 How Harlan writes chapters 1:02:23 Main vs secondary characters 1:04:37 Don’t talk about your book 1:06:46 Why routines stop working 1:10:12 Stop making excuses 1:12:30 Genre vs form I've shared the full conversation with Harlan Coben below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen to the episode on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!
Video on the original post- 45Replies
- 49Reposts
- 329Likes
- 31.7KViews
0.6x average engagementHas a videoLong post (over 200 characters)Posted Thu 16:00 UTC - 04
@david_perell ·
Train stations can be lovely places to dine. They’re easy places to meet friends, and the tall ceilings make them feel spacious in ways your average bar can’t match. The restaurants are one reason why Grand Central is so special. They create an incentive to keep the station clean and safe, which benefits everybody.
Photo on the original post- 15Replies
- 38Reposts
- 797Likes
- 64.2KViews
0.4x average engagementHas an imageLong post (over 200 characters)Posted Fri 04:00 UTCQuote post - 05
@david_perell ·
This was my favorite painting as a kid. It hung in our living room, where I would stare at the little train on the right edge of the painting and wonder where it was going. As I got older, I thought more about the horse. Then, the person riding it. Year after year, I’d ask my parents to pass it down to me. Once I turned 30, my mother said I was finally mature enough to own it. Only then did I realize that my great-grandfather painted it in 1925.
Photo on the original post- 24Replies
- 15Reposts
- 575Likes
- 25KViews
0.2x average engagementHas an imageLong post (over 200 characters)Posted Fri 03:00 UTC - 06
@david_perell ·
Me: Have 150 tabs open on my browser and refuse to close them because each one feels so precious Me after Google Chrome crashes: Wow my computer feels so clean now, and don't even remember what tabs I had open 30 seconds ago
- 41Replies
- 14Reposts
- 405Likes
- 30.9KViews
0.2x average engagementText onlyLong post (over 200 characters)Posted Fri 01:00 UTC
Formats
Content mix
- Text only
- 15%
- With media
- 85%
- With links
- 0 posts
- With hashtags
- 0 posts
Creator style: High-reach broadcaster
Grow your own account
Want numbers like @david_perell's?
Xholic writes posts in your voice, schedules them for the hours your audience is active, and tracks what's working every day.
$0 today · Cancel anytime
Keep browsing
More in Creators & YouTubers
See all of Creators & YouTubers
Keep exploring
Free tools
- Compare Twitter AccountsPut two public accounts head to head and see who leads on views, engagement, grade and posting pace.
- Twitter Engagement Rate CalculatorCalculate engagement rate from your numbers or a public profile and grade it against your tier.
- X Monetization CalculatorChange the assumptions behind six X revenue models and compare gross revenue with direct contribution.
Guides
- X/Twitter Analytics Glossary: Every Metric Explained (2026)Definitions, formulas, benchmarks, and actions for X/Twitter analytics metrics including impressions, reach, engagement, followers, clicks, and revenue.
- How to Check an X Follower Count Live (and Read the Trend)Watch any public X account's follower count refresh every minute, read the session and 90-day charts, and see why the number differs from the X app.
From the blog
- X Analytics for Brands & Businesses: A Practical GuideHow brands and businesses use X/Twitter analytics to track reach, engagement, and ROI — with the KPIs that actually matter.
- Twitter Analytics Metrics That Actually Drive GrowthLearn which twitter analytics metrics predict growth on X, how to read them together, and the workflow that turns data into better posts and replies.
Best tweets on this topic
- Best tweets about Newsletter GrowthDiscover the best tweets about newsletter growth, covering audience acquisition, referrals, content, conversion, retention, Substack, Beehiiv, and revenue.
- Best tweets about Content MarketingExplore the best tweets about content marketing, featuring strategy, research, distribution, formats, measurement, repurposing, and audience growth.
- Best tweets about X GrowthBrowse the best tweets about growing on X, including content strategy, engagement, positioning, analytics, audience building, and sustainable account growth.
About this data
- Analytics are inferred from public profile and recent post data. They do not include private impressions, profile visits, link clicks, or follower-source data.
- Deleted, protected, unavailable, or rate-limited posts may be missing from the sample.
- Stats come from public posts Xholic has stored, not private X Analytics. Xholic is not affiliated with X Corp or @david_perell.
- Own this account and want this page removed? Email [email protected].