I am paid to write for a living -- I write articles about technology for a software company and have done so for quite some time. When I was a kid, of course, this isn't quite what I meant when I said, "I want to be a writer when I grow up," but it's a good living and I enjoy it most of the time.
For a long time I figured I would eventually write a book or two, but the more I paid attention to the whole publishing thing, the more I realized that, even if I wrote something really terrific, it probably wouldn't get published, and if it did it probably wouldn't make any money. And since I write for a living already, it's really hard to get into it as a hobby.
The AI thing is just a whole other layer of shit.
I still need a creative outlet, however, so I started to get back into the visual arts (my original plan before I fell into an English degree). I wandered through painting and printmaking and textile arts and &c. to finally settle on ceramics. Now I use mud and fire to create actual physical objects that people can hold and use every day. Mugs are my favourite so far, because everyone has a favourite mug, and it makes me happy when someone's favourite mug is something that I created.
I guess my point is that each piece of pottery I make almost always has an audience of one. Not a specific person I have in mind when I make a thing, but a person who sees the thing and loves it so much that they'll pay $40 or $50 for it rather than going to Ikea and buying something functionally equivalent for $3. The tiniest of audiences.
There are some people who make an extremely lucrative living around making pottery, *but* those people generally spend more time _making content_ about making pottery rather than actually making pottery. It's exhausting to watch and something I'm not interested in doing at all.
I'll never get rich from making pottery, but I'm lucky because don't have to.
Anyhow. Maybe there's a point in there somewhere. Maybe it's that the idea of hustle culture is utterly exhausting and I'm so glad to see some artists stepping back from it.
"Hustle culture" — haven't heard that phrase and it's perfect for all this. I have a friend who has a similar thing to your pottery: she's a great painter but again conceives for an audience of one, which is the way it used to be.
And a favorite mug is IMPORTANT. Genuinely. We all have them and they become such a part of our lives that they're almost friends. So much more lasting and meaningful than five minutes of "content" that's gone before people have even started watching or reading it...
This situation was set in motion about 20 years ago, when publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with websites, so they just stuck their magazine and newspaper content online for free. It didn’t matter much then because no-one wanted to read articles on a CRT monitor via a dial up modem, but over time it trained society to believe that content is supposed to be free. The next stage was publishers having to rely on advertising rather than paying consumers for income to pay creators, and now here we are. However, I think there is a tipping point on the horizon. In a year or two, the only writing most people will have easy access to will be produced by brand marketing folk, or A.I. In both cases, it will be bland, soulless, and trying to sell you something. I believe people are the same as they ever were, they want to read / watch / listen to stuff that moves and challenges them. The issue isn’t with the audience or the creators, it’s with the entities who have inserted themselves between those groups in order to leach money from both. I reckon a new zine era is coming, just via sites like Substack, where creator and consumer are in direct contact. It’ll be a traumatic transition, especially for those of us who make a living from creation, but I’m looking forward to seeing how things look out the other side…
I think/hope you're right, actually — and zines might be the way this new way of creating breaks. Interesting thought. And maybe growing consumer dissatisfaction with crap will be a stronger driving force than I fear...
I’m from a trade journalism background and tend to think of groups / communities rather than people at large. In my sector, three publications have folded since the pandemic (including the one I had been running for 15 years), so trade journalism in that market is dead. The big brands in the space (booze) have launched walled garden community websites designed to fill the gap, and the content is dire. Every word has gone through the brand guideline wringer and is completely sanitised. I have no doubt that in a year or two everyone will be sick of it, and someone with more energy than me will launch a version of the thing I just closed, and it’ll do well because the writing is real. I would be eating popcorn and enjoying the spectacle if I wasn’t unemployed because of it.
I have a bunch of thoughts about this, but they’re not very well organised. Hopefully I can sound mostly unfocused rather than mostly incoherent.
This is all related to the whole “1000 True Fans” idea, I think. I suspect you already know about this, but https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ if not. It dates from a previous era (2008 or so) but the idea is that what you need as a writer, singer, painter, whatever is one thousand people who will buy, from you directly, everything you put out there. With that, you’re sustainable. (Just. Maybe. Picture me doing the wobbly-hand gesture of being unsure at this point.) There are a bunch of problems with this model (many of which are addressed by the author) but the _idea_ of it may be a good one, that the thing to aim for is a narrow but deep pool of people who dig your stuff a lot rather than a shallow but wide group who barely know your name. Shallow but wide is the only way you get to be a millionaire, but the underlying, unspoken implication is that for this reason there should perhaps not be millionaires.
One of the bigger problems, I think, with cultivating that close but deep relationship is that your people have to dig _you_, not _the thing that you do_, because otherwise if you do a different thing they won’t come with you. This, i imagine, is something you understand at a cellular level. I mean, just ask Michael Rutger when you next see him. :-) But it’s hard to cultivate that level of relationship without it becoming a bit parasocial in places. This is something that in particular has hit YouTube creator types, I think; building a rapport by showing vulnerability and letting people in means that you’ve let them in and now they have more power to damage. Walking that line sounds very difficult to me, and the limited extent to which I’ve tried has persuaded me that I would be very bad at it and should not try further.
See, finding a thousand true fans (or even a thousand untrue fans) basically means being good at marketing. I hate this and I’m bad at it which is one of the reasons I’ve let the (tiny, medium-sized-fish-in-tiny-pond) level of visibility I had as an author (tech books and public writing and speaking, not fiction) dwindle still further. I believe that in the distant past there was a world where one could write a book and deliver a manuscript and that was it, and putting that book in front of everyone on earth was someone else’s job, a person who took a percentage for doing that job, and that was it. But I’m not sure it’s been the case in my lifetime. Maybe it’s like hotel bars that will keep serving until dawn because “we’re residents”; a thing spoken of in whispers but not actually seen and never was. Anyway, the thing which stops me from trying to publish is that I’d have to do a bunch of work myself to draw people’s attention to it and I hate it _so_ much, so I’d rather not. So my writing energy goes into things at work, my D&D campaign, blog posts, rather than doing anything real where I might (will) fail. How much of this is straight up cowardice is open to debate, but the answer is “more than I’m prepared to admit”.
Sometimes I think: there’s the continuum between “art I make because I want to; doesn’t matter if anybody else sees it” and “art I make because people will buy it; doesn’t matter whether I think it’s good or not”, and everyone chooses some position on that line for every work. And you say, I wish people just wanted to buy the stuff I want to make. I reckon literally every person who makes things has had this thought. Rembrandt thought it. Virgil thought it. Ea-nasir probably thought it. And a bunch of people queue up to say (in that sneering tone that The Voice of the People has when it’s having a go at you) that the world doesn’t owe you a living, that if what the people want to buy is not what you want to create then that’s your problem, and they’re right, but it’s hard not to think: they bloody well _ought_ to like this thing I made! It’s really good! I only need a thousand people! Aaargh!
This is way too long, and my fears of incoherence were correct. And I don’t even think I have a conclusion or even a point to make. Maybe it’s this: you’re right. Every artist, every person who makes art, at every point in history has felt contaminated a little bit by how they had to put in effort to sell rather than to make, and the world is and always has been tilted in favour of arseholes who know how to make money at the expense of everyone else. But today is worse than yesterday was, even by those standards. This is not a good thing.
Wow. So much useful stuff in this. I hadn't heard of the 100 True Fans idea, but I guess that's a part of what I'm talking about... [and I should have remembered the word "parasocial" to encompass some of it]. But you're right about the distinction between "liking this creator" and "like this particular subset of their work, rather than them in general" — because that part can be truly challenging, ,especially if you're a "creator" who's not great at picking a lane and sticking to it...
I don't feel contaminated by the need to pimp a brand, or not as much as I used to: I increasingly accept that comes with the territory. I'm just not very bloody good at it. Partly I guess because it feels weird and takes up so much time...
haha, "I have a bunch of thoughts about this, but they’re not very well organised. Hopefully I can sound mostly unfocused rather than mostly incoherent."
How I start my every social interaction. discovering I am ADHD/autistic/dyslexic/dysgraphic helps me understand why, and why it is challenging to put my thoughts into words.
Reading this MMS substack I immediately thought of some of my creative friends that I have been roleplaying with since the 90s. The nature of collective story telling in a D&D campaign is that smaller audience, and it is some of my most fulfilling life experiences. It is also the arena where I met my life partner.
This is a deeply thoughtful post on a very interesting issue that we're facing as a society, and I appreciate the perspective you're able to bring to it as someone who finds that the once boggy but relatively solid ground under his feet is becoming alarmingly unstable.
I guess I come at this whole topic from a different angle to most people because I have always thought of the idea of creating for a wide audience rather distasteful, almost a betrayal to my inner being. When I've created anything with that purpose in mind, I feel annoyed at myself for having shared it if people don't respond to it positively, because negative feedback or the lack of engagement with it reduces my own enjoyment of it. On the other hand, if they do respond to it positively, after an initial pulse of feeling pleased that it has connected with someone, I feel ashamed of myself for seeking validation from people whose opinion I know I shouldn't value above my own evaluation of what I've produced: to me the value should lie in the experience and process of creating it.
There's a disturbing amount of need-for-autonomy in this area for me. So: I create for myself, stuff on a whim that entertains me only, knowing that to share it would dilute my enjoyment of it, or I create for one other person, as a way of connecting and interacting and evolving my relationship with them. If anyone else happens to see that thing I've created for that person and finds value in it, then that's great, but I'm most happy for it never to be seen by anyone but its intended recipient, as long as that person has engaged with it and our personal connection has been deepened by it.
I obviously don't think everyone should go this route otherwise there would be no works of creation in the public domain to appreciate or buy or innovate from at all, except by a long process of having been shared by the people who have been chosen to receive something thinking it might have value to others. That's way too slow a process and way too reliant on serendipity for our modern culture to re-adapt to. But I think there's certainly room for a lot more of it, and if there were more of it then the world would likely be more deeply connected and thus a lot richer for it.
Couldn't agree more. And I think one of the ways that professional "creators" can stay same is by having a side-game where they produce some things only for a small group, and perhaps even only for themselves. I almost never play the guitar, for example, when other people can hear me. And I resist any attempt to make it into something I can charge for or that becomes a "performance". It's just for me. Some creating can be, and possibly some creating SHOULD be.
I loved the picture of your joint shared saturday night. Very similar to ours although I now create flowing movement sequences for my clients not write. Everything you said resonated with thoughts I have been quietly mulling around with the whole of this year. Thank you for so brilliantly putting it all into words that makes sense. Fiona
I find I don't have the strength any more. So much so that the effort to yet again re-confirm my account here in order to post almost made me close out instead.
In the 80s I was already in the mind-space that "if I build it, they will come". I never considered art for art's sake, I already wanted an audience. The rock star mentality, almost Spinal Tap incarnate. At least back then I would have to convince at least one other person, and then an entire organisation, to front the money to turn my dreams into their profit. After that it would be down to the public to be convinced by the amount of marketing that organisation could do to bring awareness to my 'product'. I wrote it from the heart, but always guided by what I thought the public might want to hear.
[There was to be a whole middle-period explanation here of what made me give up, but I've already burned out in just the three minutes it took me to write this.]
I managed to get a track I worked on a long time ago in the last season of Stranger Things, so the money still trickles through. The last project I worked on, just this week, was for a YouTube channel. I think I've given up.
Given up or reframed? But yeah — the reframing approach is all very well, but if it's the only thing you can actually DO (as writing is for me) there are some challenging (and dispiriting) things ahead... What was the track in STRANGER THINGS?
I don't think I've done anything truly new since covid; I've re-hashed some old stuff which gave a brief feeling of satisfaction. I think it could be fair to say I've actually given up, though.
The Stranger Things track was something I played keyboards on, some 40-odd years ago. I'm uncredited, so only my PPL statements can prove it was me, but it was… Pass the Dutchie, Musical Youth. I used to work with Pete Collins & Pete Waterman way back then.
I want to let you know that I have shared this with four of my favourite people, all of us creators, that need to read this. Very wise words, sir. Very succinctly put.
There's a lot here that articulates quite nicely the various melt-downs I've had where I punish myself for not making more money from book sales vs being extremely pleased about the handful of people who have gone out of their way to buy and read something I've written.
I've watched a friend trying to make a living and support their family as a full time horror writer, and the subsequent stress and crippling self-doubt they have gone through. I'm not in a position where I could ever give up my full time job to write, and honestly I don't think I could cope with that kind of pressure to hit book sales targets month after month. Any earnings I make from book sales goes in the treat fund (normally beer and / or graphic novels) and for the most part I am happy with that arrangement.
The part that gives me the most joy, and which I think ties in nicely with the smaller audience idea, is open mic nights for storytellers and poets. Reading to people, however many, gives you an instant connection. You see and feel the response to a line you have written, and the buzz is incredible. And though it certainly doesn't happen at all the arranged events I have been to, there is one local monthly poetry night that passes around a hat for the audience to make donations for the headliner act. It may not pay the bills, but it's enough for a few pints.
Very true. I kind of made the jump rather rashly into full-time writing after getting a good advance... and it's been a (slow motion) rollercoaster ever since, of patching things together, then sometimes having a great few years, then back into a slide... it's not for the faint of heart.
And honestly, I'm not sure that anything that's happened via books has touched the feeling of doing live comedy shows with pals from college 35 years ago, in front of real people, and riding the crest of those evenings where it's all working and everybody both on stage in the audience reaches some unspoken agreement that we're all just going ot have a good time. You're right — that buzz IS incredible.
I’ve happily been a part of the small audiences—being in a dual income, no kids household, I could justify buying a $40 hand-thrown mug instead of the $3 from Ikea, as Deb mentioned.
I do have concerns about AI, though. I am a technical writer, or more specifically, a technical subject matter expert who communicates to non-experts. But it’s becoming harder for my boss to justify to their boss why they should pay me instead of just Googling. So far I’ve been able to demonstrate that my value is knowing where the AI Google results are wrong…but soon, I’m afraid that prevalent answers will become accepted answers no matter how wrong they are, and I’ll be looking for a job selling $3 mugs at Ikea instead of patronizing the arts.
Yep, that's the worry... not least because the people paying the wages often aren't the people who can look at a chunk of AI text and be able to spot "Uh... that's wrong".
You hit the nail on all the heads here. From a slightly different perspective, I was in a band for ten years and then wound up being a magazine editor for twenty. I was a good lyricist but a crappy singer… I was a pretty good mag editor though, but as tech got to be the go to place for just about anything, magazines died on the vine. Nearly all of them - unless, like you say here - you were already top of the tree. Sounds? Melody Maker? Village Voice? And though some are still around online, they hardly pay a fledgling writer (nor experienced) because there’s always somebody willing to do it for breadcrumbs and attention… thus, the quality diminishes until the brand is floating face down in a sea of click bait.
I’ve all but given up trying now. My old life is over and I’m backed into a similar corner as you and probably thousands of others. If you wrote Straw Men today (a truly excellent little series) would it even see the light of day - and how would I find it? Sometimes I think having gatekeepers was a good idea but those cats are NOT going back in the bag are they.
So yeah… totally agree but I have no real answers either. Having said that, there are some crumpets in the cupboard and I’m home alone, so that’s as good as the day is likely to get.
... and those pleasures are real, and not to be underestimated or shoved aside in the constant battle to get your stuff out there. I've know idea if STRAW MEN would find a readership these days: I don't know how anybody just starting out does unless they're on Tik Tok. I think I preferred the obvious gatekeepers to the invisible ones of algorithms...
Christa and I talk about this a lot. "What even IS publishing?" starts the conversation. When I started writing, the only two writers I knew were Neil and Clive. I very naïvely thought I should be able to make something of this, if not everything. Wasn't that what the fates were saying?
Well, THAT was silly of me, eh?
Now I'm on this Facebook group of self-publishers where people have these multiple book series that earn them over a quarter million a year -- or more! They're writing urban fantasy or romance or something that I don't enjoy reading or writing. They might be writing to formula (romance definitely has one). I met a woman who's retired and making a modest $600 a month in Amazon royalties alone. Again, writing a genre I don't love but many people do. But Christa is excited that I'm self-publishing the La Maupin book because it's doing something new. It cost a LOT of money -- developmental editor, beta readers, cover designer, proofreader, layout, etc. -- but it's a solid book, I think, that no one wanted. And I know readers want it.
*I* want it. The audience of one.
Fortunately, I really do love my day job as a UX content designer. It gives me a sense of comfort that lets me create ART. To do what I want. To not worry if I write a best-selling book. I never will. But I've written at least one very good book. And that pleases me. (And, apparently, a bookseller somewhere here in L.A. because she just told my husband's manager that it's one of her favorite books and I'm one of her favorite authors.)
So, there's that.
This is all just to say that I appreciate your updated this sort of new Rilke-ian perspective. "Letters to a Young Poet" got me through a rough period with my first agent. It's easy to forget why we're writing. Was it ever to make a living? When we wrote that first short story, were we really thinking that? Or just enjoying the act of word weaving as an captivating idea raced circles in our hearts and minds?
Creating art is the only way to stay human and whole. All that other shit...is just shit.
Very true — especially about how and why we started. I wrote my first story to get stuff out of my head and hopefully entertain a few people. The rest of it... that's career.
Very glad to hear you're making such concrete steps in the self-publishing sphere. As you say, there's definitely money to be made out there... but it seems to be in genres that I've always found a little generic, and have no hope of writing. Maybe even that has to be reconsidered...
Yes, but on the other hand, this is precisely what drew me to your writing and inspires me -- your unique stories and style. I think that it has to be the same way some actors do schlocky films for the money and then more artsy films that they enjoy. The generic stuff (under a pseudonym) that creates the steady income and the real stuff for the True Fans (tm). Anyway, something I've been pondering.
This post made me examine for the first time my role as a consumer of the arts, rather than as a creative. During covid times, where I lived through some of the longest mandated lockdowns, our options were television, spotify, kindle. I listened to podcasts rather than reading books, stopped going to galleries and live music, however the authenticity gap became bigger, the need for personal engagement in the arts I'm consuming grew, and over the past 12 months I've regularly go to local galleries rather than major/national ones, regularly attend Shakespeare in the gardens instead of the movies, read physical books instead of a kindle. Bluesky has allowed me to engage with writers and authors in the way twitter did in its early days. Real community, personal contact, engagement, is a rarer commodity now than it used to be, and your ideas on selective appeal resonates with many. btw, I miss your photography MMS.
Sounds like you've made your own steps to re-engage with the real stuff, and it's working for you. I really think this kind of swerve is going to be the way forward, with benefits for both creator and consumer. More of this!
Thank you on the pictures — I must get back to doing that!
By the by, I got one of those Amazon "We found something you might like..." emails this afternoon suggesting that I buy BAD THINGS. I was delighted for you that Amazon was still pimping that on your behalf... until I realised that the only reason it was doing so was because I spent an evening this week reading reviews of ONLY FORWARD, SPARES, and ONE OF US because I was trying to find the right review to entice Matilda to choose one of them to read and do a book project on for school.
(My efforts didn't work, I'm afraid. She read 12 pages of OF before saying "Hell no!", and so she's now grounded for having poor taste. I'll try again when she's 17, and if that fails I will try to foist it upon some of her more broad-minded friends, because I'm determined to get your work in front of the eyes of generation Alpha.)
Ha... don't be too hard on her ;-) Yeah, it's all the algo I'm afraid... Amazon sends me invitations to buy my own book occasionally because I've gone there to grab a review or something...
I am paid to write for a living -- I write articles about technology for a software company and have done so for quite some time. When I was a kid, of course, this isn't quite what I meant when I said, "I want to be a writer when I grow up," but it's a good living and I enjoy it most of the time.
For a long time I figured I would eventually write a book or two, but the more I paid attention to the whole publishing thing, the more I realized that, even if I wrote something really terrific, it probably wouldn't get published, and if it did it probably wouldn't make any money. And since I write for a living already, it's really hard to get into it as a hobby.
The AI thing is just a whole other layer of shit.
I still need a creative outlet, however, so I started to get back into the visual arts (my original plan before I fell into an English degree). I wandered through painting and printmaking and textile arts and &c. to finally settle on ceramics. Now I use mud and fire to create actual physical objects that people can hold and use every day. Mugs are my favourite so far, because everyone has a favourite mug, and it makes me happy when someone's favourite mug is something that I created.
I guess my point is that each piece of pottery I make almost always has an audience of one. Not a specific person I have in mind when I make a thing, but a person who sees the thing and loves it so much that they'll pay $40 or $50 for it rather than going to Ikea and buying something functionally equivalent for $3. The tiniest of audiences.
There are some people who make an extremely lucrative living around making pottery, *but* those people generally spend more time _making content_ about making pottery rather than actually making pottery. It's exhausting to watch and something I'm not interested in doing at all.
I'll never get rich from making pottery, but I'm lucky because don't have to.
Anyhow. Maybe there's a point in there somewhere. Maybe it's that the idea of hustle culture is utterly exhausting and I'm so glad to see some artists stepping back from it.
"Hustle culture" — haven't heard that phrase and it's perfect for all this. I have a friend who has a similar thing to your pottery: she's a great painter but again conceives for an audience of one, which is the way it used to be.
And a favorite mug is IMPORTANT. Genuinely. We all have them and they become such a part of our lives that they're almost friends. So much more lasting and meaningful than five minutes of "content" that's gone before people have even started watching or reading it...
This situation was set in motion about 20 years ago, when publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with websites, so they just stuck their magazine and newspaper content online for free. It didn’t matter much then because no-one wanted to read articles on a CRT monitor via a dial up modem, but over time it trained society to believe that content is supposed to be free. The next stage was publishers having to rely on advertising rather than paying consumers for income to pay creators, and now here we are. However, I think there is a tipping point on the horizon. In a year or two, the only writing most people will have easy access to will be produced by brand marketing folk, or A.I. In both cases, it will be bland, soulless, and trying to sell you something. I believe people are the same as they ever were, they want to read / watch / listen to stuff that moves and challenges them. The issue isn’t with the audience or the creators, it’s with the entities who have inserted themselves between those groups in order to leach money from both. I reckon a new zine era is coming, just via sites like Substack, where creator and consumer are in direct contact. It’ll be a traumatic transition, especially for those of us who make a living from creation, but I’m looking forward to seeing how things look out the other side…
I think/hope you're right, actually — and zines might be the way this new way of creating breaks. Interesting thought. And maybe growing consumer dissatisfaction with crap will be a stronger driving force than I fear...
I’m from a trade journalism background and tend to think of groups / communities rather than people at large. In my sector, three publications have folded since the pandemic (including the one I had been running for 15 years), so trade journalism in that market is dead. The big brands in the space (booze) have launched walled garden community websites designed to fill the gap, and the content is dire. Every word has gone through the brand guideline wringer and is completely sanitised. I have no doubt that in a year or two everyone will be sick of it, and someone with more energy than me will launch a version of the thing I just closed, and it’ll do well because the writing is real. I would be eating popcorn and enjoying the spectacle if I wasn’t unemployed because of it.
Wow - sorry for posting almost the same reply as you! That’s just weird - but now that’s three of us that think the same thing. We can’t all be wrong!
WE ARE ALL CORRECT :-)
I have a bunch of thoughts about this, but they’re not very well organised. Hopefully I can sound mostly unfocused rather than mostly incoherent.
This is all related to the whole “1000 True Fans” idea, I think. I suspect you already know about this, but https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ if not. It dates from a previous era (2008 or so) but the idea is that what you need as a writer, singer, painter, whatever is one thousand people who will buy, from you directly, everything you put out there. With that, you’re sustainable. (Just. Maybe. Picture me doing the wobbly-hand gesture of being unsure at this point.) There are a bunch of problems with this model (many of which are addressed by the author) but the _idea_ of it may be a good one, that the thing to aim for is a narrow but deep pool of people who dig your stuff a lot rather than a shallow but wide group who barely know your name. Shallow but wide is the only way you get to be a millionaire, but the underlying, unspoken implication is that for this reason there should perhaps not be millionaires.
One of the bigger problems, I think, with cultivating that close but deep relationship is that your people have to dig _you_, not _the thing that you do_, because otherwise if you do a different thing they won’t come with you. This, i imagine, is something you understand at a cellular level. I mean, just ask Michael Rutger when you next see him. :-) But it’s hard to cultivate that level of relationship without it becoming a bit parasocial in places. This is something that in particular has hit YouTube creator types, I think; building a rapport by showing vulnerability and letting people in means that you’ve let them in and now they have more power to damage. Walking that line sounds very difficult to me, and the limited extent to which I’ve tried has persuaded me that I would be very bad at it and should not try further.
See, finding a thousand true fans (or even a thousand untrue fans) basically means being good at marketing. I hate this and I’m bad at it which is one of the reasons I’ve let the (tiny, medium-sized-fish-in-tiny-pond) level of visibility I had as an author (tech books and public writing and speaking, not fiction) dwindle still further. I believe that in the distant past there was a world where one could write a book and deliver a manuscript and that was it, and putting that book in front of everyone on earth was someone else’s job, a person who took a percentage for doing that job, and that was it. But I’m not sure it’s been the case in my lifetime. Maybe it’s like hotel bars that will keep serving until dawn because “we’re residents”; a thing spoken of in whispers but not actually seen and never was. Anyway, the thing which stops me from trying to publish is that I’d have to do a bunch of work myself to draw people’s attention to it and I hate it _so_ much, so I’d rather not. So my writing energy goes into things at work, my D&D campaign, blog posts, rather than doing anything real where I might (will) fail. How much of this is straight up cowardice is open to debate, but the answer is “more than I’m prepared to admit”.
Sometimes I think: there’s the continuum between “art I make because I want to; doesn’t matter if anybody else sees it” and “art I make because people will buy it; doesn’t matter whether I think it’s good or not”, and everyone chooses some position on that line for every work. And you say, I wish people just wanted to buy the stuff I want to make. I reckon literally every person who makes things has had this thought. Rembrandt thought it. Virgil thought it. Ea-nasir probably thought it. And a bunch of people queue up to say (in that sneering tone that The Voice of the People has when it’s having a go at you) that the world doesn’t owe you a living, that if what the people want to buy is not what you want to create then that’s your problem, and they’re right, but it’s hard not to think: they bloody well _ought_ to like this thing I made! It’s really good! I only need a thousand people! Aaargh!
This is way too long, and my fears of incoherence were correct. And I don’t even think I have a conclusion or even a point to make. Maybe it’s this: you’re right. Every artist, every person who makes art, at every point in history has felt contaminated a little bit by how they had to put in effort to sell rather than to make, and the world is and always has been tilted in favour of arseholes who know how to make money at the expense of everyone else. But today is worse than yesterday was, even by those standards. This is not a good thing.
Wow. So much useful stuff in this. I hadn't heard of the 100 True Fans idea, but I guess that's a part of what I'm talking about... [and I should have remembered the word "parasocial" to encompass some of it]. But you're right about the distinction between "liking this creator" and "like this particular subset of their work, rather than them in general" — because that part can be truly challenging, ,especially if you're a "creator" who's not great at picking a lane and sticking to it...
I don't feel contaminated by the need to pimp a brand, or not as much as I used to: I increasingly accept that comes with the territory. I'm just not very bloody good at it. Partly I guess because it feels weird and takes up so much time...
haha, "I have a bunch of thoughts about this, but they’re not very well organised. Hopefully I can sound mostly unfocused rather than mostly incoherent."
How I start my every social interaction. discovering I am ADHD/autistic/dyslexic/dysgraphic helps me understand why, and why it is challenging to put my thoughts into words.
Reading this MMS substack I immediately thought of some of my creative friends that I have been roleplaying with since the 90s. The nature of collective story telling in a D&D campaign is that smaller audience, and it is some of my most fulfilling life experiences. It is also the arena where I met my life partner.
Interesting - I can see how that would work!
This is a deeply thoughtful post on a very interesting issue that we're facing as a society, and I appreciate the perspective you're able to bring to it as someone who finds that the once boggy but relatively solid ground under his feet is becoming alarmingly unstable.
I guess I come at this whole topic from a different angle to most people because I have always thought of the idea of creating for a wide audience rather distasteful, almost a betrayal to my inner being. When I've created anything with that purpose in mind, I feel annoyed at myself for having shared it if people don't respond to it positively, because negative feedback or the lack of engagement with it reduces my own enjoyment of it. On the other hand, if they do respond to it positively, after an initial pulse of feeling pleased that it has connected with someone, I feel ashamed of myself for seeking validation from people whose opinion I know I shouldn't value above my own evaluation of what I've produced: to me the value should lie in the experience and process of creating it.
There's a disturbing amount of need-for-autonomy in this area for me. So: I create for myself, stuff on a whim that entertains me only, knowing that to share it would dilute my enjoyment of it, or I create for one other person, as a way of connecting and interacting and evolving my relationship with them. If anyone else happens to see that thing I've created for that person and finds value in it, then that's great, but I'm most happy for it never to be seen by anyone but its intended recipient, as long as that person has engaged with it and our personal connection has been deepened by it.
I obviously don't think everyone should go this route otherwise there would be no works of creation in the public domain to appreciate or buy or innovate from at all, except by a long process of having been shared by the people who have been chosen to receive something thinking it might have value to others. That's way too slow a process and way too reliant on serendipity for our modern culture to re-adapt to. But I think there's certainly room for a lot more of it, and if there were more of it then the world would likely be more deeply connected and thus a lot richer for it.
Couldn't agree more. And I think one of the ways that professional "creators" can stay same is by having a side-game where they produce some things only for a small group, and perhaps even only for themselves. I almost never play the guitar, for example, when other people can hear me. And I resist any attempt to make it into something I can charge for or that becomes a "performance". It's just for me. Some creating can be, and possibly some creating SHOULD be.
I loved the picture of your joint shared saturday night. Very similar to ours although I now create flowing movement sequences for my clients not write. Everything you said resonated with thoughts I have been quietly mulling around with the whole of this year. Thank you for so brilliantly putting it all into words that makes sense. Fiona
Thank you — really glad you felt that way and thank you for letting me know.
I find I don't have the strength any more. So much so that the effort to yet again re-confirm my account here in order to post almost made me close out instead.
In the 80s I was already in the mind-space that "if I build it, they will come". I never considered art for art's sake, I already wanted an audience. The rock star mentality, almost Spinal Tap incarnate. At least back then I would have to convince at least one other person, and then an entire organisation, to front the money to turn my dreams into their profit. After that it would be down to the public to be convinced by the amount of marketing that organisation could do to bring awareness to my 'product'. I wrote it from the heart, but always guided by what I thought the public might want to hear.
[There was to be a whole middle-period explanation here of what made me give up, but I've already burned out in just the three minutes it took me to write this.]
I managed to get a track I worked on a long time ago in the last season of Stranger Things, so the money still trickles through. The last project I worked on, just this week, was for a YouTube channel. I think I've given up.
You're right.
Given up or reframed? But yeah — the reframing approach is all very well, but if it's the only thing you can actually DO (as writing is for me) there are some challenging (and dispiriting) things ahead... What was the track in STRANGER THINGS?
I don't think I've done anything truly new since covid; I've re-hashed some old stuff which gave a brief feeling of satisfaction. I think it could be fair to say I've actually given up, though.
The Stranger Things track was something I played keyboards on, some 40-odd years ago. I'm uncredited, so only my PPL statements can prove it was me, but it was… Pass the Dutchie, Musical Youth. I used to work with Pete Collins & Pete Waterman way back then.
I want to let you know that I have shared this with four of my favourite people, all of us creators, that need to read this. Very wise words, sir. Very succinctly put.
Thank you so much — and I'm really glad it resonated with you.
There's a lot here that articulates quite nicely the various melt-downs I've had where I punish myself for not making more money from book sales vs being extremely pleased about the handful of people who have gone out of their way to buy and read something I've written.
I've watched a friend trying to make a living and support their family as a full time horror writer, and the subsequent stress and crippling self-doubt they have gone through. I'm not in a position where I could ever give up my full time job to write, and honestly I don't think I could cope with that kind of pressure to hit book sales targets month after month. Any earnings I make from book sales goes in the treat fund (normally beer and / or graphic novels) and for the most part I am happy with that arrangement.
The part that gives me the most joy, and which I think ties in nicely with the smaller audience idea, is open mic nights for storytellers and poets. Reading to people, however many, gives you an instant connection. You see and feel the response to a line you have written, and the buzz is incredible. And though it certainly doesn't happen at all the arranged events I have been to, there is one local monthly poetry night that passes around a hat for the audience to make donations for the headliner act. It may not pay the bills, but it's enough for a few pints.
And I'd be happy with that.
Very true. I kind of made the jump rather rashly into full-time writing after getting a good advance... and it's been a (slow motion) rollercoaster ever since, of patching things together, then sometimes having a great few years, then back into a slide... it's not for the faint of heart.
And honestly, I'm not sure that anything that's happened via books has touched the feeling of doing live comedy shows with pals from college 35 years ago, in front of real people, and riding the crest of those evenings where it's all working and everybody both on stage in the audience reaches some unspoken agreement that we're all just going ot have a good time. You're right — that buzz IS incredible.
Unfortunately, I only agree with this ONE HUNDRED TRILLION PERCENT. But fortunately, I also agree with this an extra FIVE THOUSAND TRILLION PERCENT!!!
That's... a lot of percent! Thank you — and thank you for reading :)
I’ve happily been a part of the small audiences—being in a dual income, no kids household, I could justify buying a $40 hand-thrown mug instead of the $3 from Ikea, as Deb mentioned.
I do have concerns about AI, though. I am a technical writer, or more specifically, a technical subject matter expert who communicates to non-experts. But it’s becoming harder for my boss to justify to their boss why they should pay me instead of just Googling. So far I’ve been able to demonstrate that my value is knowing where the AI Google results are wrong…but soon, I’m afraid that prevalent answers will become accepted answers no matter how wrong they are, and I’ll be looking for a job selling $3 mugs at Ikea instead of patronizing the arts.
Yep, that's the worry... not least because the people paying the wages often aren't the people who can look at a chunk of AI text and be able to spot "Uh... that's wrong".
You hit the nail on all the heads here. From a slightly different perspective, I was in a band for ten years and then wound up being a magazine editor for twenty. I was a good lyricist but a crappy singer… I was a pretty good mag editor though, but as tech got to be the go to place for just about anything, magazines died on the vine. Nearly all of them - unless, like you say here - you were already top of the tree. Sounds? Melody Maker? Village Voice? And though some are still around online, they hardly pay a fledgling writer (nor experienced) because there’s always somebody willing to do it for breadcrumbs and attention… thus, the quality diminishes until the brand is floating face down in a sea of click bait.
I’ve all but given up trying now. My old life is over and I’m backed into a similar corner as you and probably thousands of others. If you wrote Straw Men today (a truly excellent little series) would it even see the light of day - and how would I find it? Sometimes I think having gatekeepers was a good idea but those cats are NOT going back in the bag are they.
So yeah… totally agree but I have no real answers either. Having said that, there are some crumpets in the cupboard and I’m home alone, so that’s as good as the day is likely to get.
On a Sunday, I think that might be just fine.
... and those pleasures are real, and not to be underestimated or shoved aside in the constant battle to get your stuff out there. I've know idea if STRAW MEN would find a readership these days: I don't know how anybody just starting out does unless they're on Tik Tok. I think I preferred the obvious gatekeepers to the invisible ones of algorithms...
This is a lovely piece. I need to go away and think about it more, though.
Thank you Helen! Would love to hear your further thoughts when you have them...
I accepted this a while ago, and now I just target my stuff to people who might care. I can't please everyone.
Yep.
Christa and I talk about this a lot. "What even IS publishing?" starts the conversation. When I started writing, the only two writers I knew were Neil and Clive. I very naïvely thought I should be able to make something of this, if not everything. Wasn't that what the fates were saying?
Well, THAT was silly of me, eh?
Now I'm on this Facebook group of self-publishers where people have these multiple book series that earn them over a quarter million a year -- or more! They're writing urban fantasy or romance or something that I don't enjoy reading or writing. They might be writing to formula (romance definitely has one). I met a woman who's retired and making a modest $600 a month in Amazon royalties alone. Again, writing a genre I don't love but many people do. But Christa is excited that I'm self-publishing the La Maupin book because it's doing something new. It cost a LOT of money -- developmental editor, beta readers, cover designer, proofreader, layout, etc. -- but it's a solid book, I think, that no one wanted. And I know readers want it.
*I* want it. The audience of one.
Fortunately, I really do love my day job as a UX content designer. It gives me a sense of comfort that lets me create ART. To do what I want. To not worry if I write a best-selling book. I never will. But I've written at least one very good book. And that pleases me. (And, apparently, a bookseller somewhere here in L.A. because she just told my husband's manager that it's one of her favorite books and I'm one of her favorite authors.)
So, there's that.
This is all just to say that I appreciate your updated this sort of new Rilke-ian perspective. "Letters to a Young Poet" got me through a rough period with my first agent. It's easy to forget why we're writing. Was it ever to make a living? When we wrote that first short story, were we really thinking that? Or just enjoying the act of word weaving as an captivating idea raced circles in our hearts and minds?
Creating art is the only way to stay human and whole. All that other shit...is just shit.
Very true — especially about how and why we started. I wrote my first story to get stuff out of my head and hopefully entertain a few people. The rest of it... that's career.
Very glad to hear you're making such concrete steps in the self-publishing sphere. As you say, there's definitely money to be made out there... but it seems to be in genres that I've always found a little generic, and have no hope of writing. Maybe even that has to be reconsidered...
Yes, but on the other hand, this is precisely what drew me to your writing and inspires me -- your unique stories and style. I think that it has to be the same way some actors do schlocky films for the money and then more artsy films that they enjoy. The generic stuff (under a pseudonym) that creates the steady income and the real stuff for the True Fans (tm). Anyway, something I've been pondering.
This post made me examine for the first time my role as a consumer of the arts, rather than as a creative. During covid times, where I lived through some of the longest mandated lockdowns, our options were television, spotify, kindle. I listened to podcasts rather than reading books, stopped going to galleries and live music, however the authenticity gap became bigger, the need for personal engagement in the arts I'm consuming grew, and over the past 12 months I've regularly go to local galleries rather than major/national ones, regularly attend Shakespeare in the gardens instead of the movies, read physical books instead of a kindle. Bluesky has allowed me to engage with writers and authors in the way twitter did in its early days. Real community, personal contact, engagement, is a rarer commodity now than it used to be, and your ideas on selective appeal resonates with many. btw, I miss your photography MMS.
Sounds like you've made your own steps to re-engage with the real stuff, and it's working for you. I really think this kind of swerve is going to be the way forward, with benefits for both creator and consumer. More of this!
Thank you on the pictures — I must get back to doing that!
By the by, I got one of those Amazon "We found something you might like..." emails this afternoon suggesting that I buy BAD THINGS. I was delighted for you that Amazon was still pimping that on your behalf... until I realised that the only reason it was doing so was because I spent an evening this week reading reviews of ONLY FORWARD, SPARES, and ONE OF US because I was trying to find the right review to entice Matilda to choose one of them to read and do a book project on for school.
(My efforts didn't work, I'm afraid. She read 12 pages of OF before saying "Hell no!", and so she's now grounded for having poor taste. I'll try again when she's 17, and if that fails I will try to foist it upon some of her more broad-minded friends, because I'm determined to get your work in front of the eyes of generation Alpha.)
Ha... don't be too hard on her ;-) Yeah, it's all the algo I'm afraid... Amazon sends me invitations to buy my own book occasionally because I've gone there to grab a review or something...