Everybody has to self-promote now. Nobody wants to
vox.comThis misses the real problem of waste in winner-take-all markets.
For each football player or musician or influencer or artist who makes it big, there are thousands of people spending millions of hours who fail. The same is probably true for developers and entrepreneurs. That time and those lessons really can't be re-purposed, and have no economic value.
I don't think failure is only a lack of merit. probably many of the failures are just as good (or better, but not lucky). But with near-costless distribution of TV rights and the internet, winners drown out others.
When you're part of a company, there's some validation ) that you're doing something useful for others (however twisted and indirect the feedback from product/profit). Otherwise, it's a bit of a waste from the perspective of society.
Some of my favourite social media content comes from unsuccessful under your terms producers. It's adding a great amount to the culture and is producing some economic value. Failed musicians become teachers with experience. Failed pro football player might be a college grad because of football.
Prestigious graduate jobs have a similar dynamic.
At university I remember my friends applying for places at Goldman & McKinsey at ratios of hundreds of applications per job.
These applications took time to make. Cumulatively the thousands of hours spend on interview prep per job may well have exceeded the total hours of work performed each successful job winner in their first year.
It seemed so wasteful to see smart young people wasting their time on regurgitating corporate values & case studies for jobs they never got.
Oh don't worry, the job itself is wasteful.
> For each football player or musician or influencer or artist who makes it big, there are thousands of people spending millions of hours who fail. The same is probably true for developers and entrepreneurs. That time and those lessons really can't be re-purposed, and have no economic value.
I played college football, you're all sorts of wrong.
Athletics teaches you discipline, teaches you how work in a team, teaches you how to properly exercise/be healthy, ad nauseum. I could go on and on and on.
Your fuckup is thinking the only thing you can get out of athletics is being a pro who makes millions.
Look at me, the failure who went to college on an athletic scholarship for football and walked away with a degree in CS & Math. I should be so ashamed...
It’s worth noting many of those are people pursuing passions, the value of which is not necessarily amenable to being quantified in economic terms.
> Otherwise, it's a bit of a waste from the perspective of society
No it's not. Society isn't only an economic system.
> That time and those lessons really can't be re-purposed, and have no economic value.
Arguably the winners need the competition to get better so in a sense the losers are there to help select a winner. In other words, knowing who is the best also includes knowing who is not, at least implicitly.
This may also be inevitable. We can imagine a world where someone declares "I'm the best at X", and there is no way to know unless it is tested, which means a competition of some kind, which means losers.
The positive side of meritocracy is that people are free to compete in whatever competition they feel they have a good chance of winning. Additionally, it serves as a learning experience to build your game and eventually become the winner. Equity (or whatever we call equalizing the playing field) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this one... no one loses but also no one really wins.
Surprised at the lack of discussion in the article around Patreon. Some of the points around the need to self-promote for artist are valid. But the popularity of funding individual(s) to produce niche content is now surprisingly mainstream.
The quote . . ." a loose collection of YouTubers and influencers who feed slop to their younger audiences." particularly sneering. There are many successful Youtube channels that produce long form quality content, but this probably applies to a lot of TikTok(?).
Anecdote - Discovered my parents, who are older, but not technologically inept, both have favorite youtube channels, Premium, and support their patreons. Which I thought was only something those of the internet generation would do.
I agree - YouTube has been an incredible driver of bottom-up content, mostly unrestrained by the traditional gatekeepers. The article doesn't seem to be much of anything. A simplistic view of the past compared to a simplistic view of the present.
> Surprised at the lack of discussion in the article around Patreon.
Traditional journalism very much has a chip on its shoulder about the success of “new media”, for obvious reasons. (How many writers at traditional outlets are pumping out copy at or below minimum wage? How do they feel looking at a successful Patreon for an independent journalist?)
Patreon has been amazing for niche creators, it's way bigger than I thought it would be. There's a long tail of podcasts and YouTubers with 1000+ supporters, which is a respectable steady income for one person, or a great side gig for two or three.
Instead of relying heavily on self promotion one other obvious alternative is to to simply not make art your sole source of income. Many great writers came to writing from other careers (not surprising, given that it meant they actually had something to write about).
There's plenty of professional jobs in the creative industries themselves. Aspiring songwriters can work as studio musicians, a lot of voice actors do other commercial work on the side, and so on.
As long as you keep your income balanced you can slowly transition from salaried work to your own work and build an audience slowly, nobody desperately needs to make it big on TikTok.
It probably also doesn't help that the following seem to be true as well:
1. Everyone is expected to make any remotely successful hobby into a business or 'side hustle'. So regardless of the activity or type of art, everyone will pressre you into trying to make it your full time job, as if the only reason to do anything is become rich and famous from it.
2. For many people, I suspect 'become a celebrity' is probably their best bet at making enough money to afford a decent living in this economy. If you're not interested in software engineering, medicine or law, then practical job options for affording a house and decent life are fairly few and far between.
3. The competition in most fields is super high due to said competition being 'everyone on the planet interested in that topic'. So if you want to stand out, you'd better be good at marketing, that's for sure.
And that last point is really the issue all media and creators have to deal with now. When the level of competition is this high, and there are so many people trying to succeed in every field, then supply is going to outrace demand. Hence why conditions are often bad when it comes to publishing and platforms, and why marketing is so ridiculously important now; there are tens or hundreds of thousands of others doing the same thing that are willing to do more poorly paid work to get their name out there.
> Despite the fact that for most people, the act of writing looks very boring, author-content creators succeed by making the visually uninteresting labor of typing on a laptop worthwhile to watch.
I heard this described as "entreporn" and find it to be accurate. Selling a coding course? Make 10 videos showing yourself pouring coffee before sitting down before your opulent WFH setup with a vertically oriented screen showing you doing Very Important Work (TM).
Everybody online is selling something and using the same tired tricks. It's exhausting to wade through these implicit ads while also flipping past the actual ads.
I've been using social media to "talk shop" without bragging, and it feels great. A great example of that is the brr.fyi blog.
Basically, it's a way for me to talk about what I do, get feedback and vent despite normally working alone. My twitter is a casual look into the details of my work. I enjoy the sort of discussion it fosters.
Likewise, I love when a blog post of mine starts a big discussion on HN. It's a good way to find my people.
I was a bit confused about how authors are supposed to bootstrap themselves into a following according to this article. Putting aside the long tail of book outcomes, do publishers really expect an author to already have a readership somehow?
I'm genuinely curious. I have no experience with this area outside of academics, which is a bit different. I guess a blog makes sense, and I've always been aware of marketing efforts, but the idea of expecting a new author to already have a readership seems like a chicken and egg problem.
Like VCs: "It's not clear that your supposed market exists. Come back when you have traction". Later: "Sorry, we prefer to get in at an earlier stage than you are."
I've been made aware of fiction authors that publish in free platforms (Say Wattpad) that use their existing following to publish either new stories (less common) or physical (Maybe improved) versions of already online books
No clue if this is actually what publishers mean by that, but there's plenty of people self publishing their work online - fan fiction probably makes up the majority of it, but there's plenty of original work out there as well.
I'm not sure writing a web serial necessarily translates to ideal novel authorship, but it does at least suggest someone who can attract readers and meet deadlines
This is definitely on my mind as I consider whether (approaching my half-century) I can switch careers at all, without going back into a full-time role.
Freelance word-of-mouth has a habit of drying up in difficult times (like the times we've been through), and at any rate it is rarely useful when you want to significantly switch direction; those mouths likely have far less interest in the new words.
There is, to some extent, a way forward, which is that you do a chunk of your primary promotion mutually. That is, find someone else you are working with a lot, or multiple someones if you are organised, whose work you respect, and agree a simple, mutual cross-promotional scheme that you can both monitor.
Or agree to swap writing biographies, marketing blurbs, all the things you find difficult about writing about yourself.
Hating self-promotion is the reason why my short entrepreneur career ended. I really loved being my own boss and building things, but man I just hated hyping up my product.
“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise”
-Ted Turner (1990?)
“A truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital [..] Therefore a formidable barrier such as a company [..] possessing a powerful worldwide brand (Coca-Cola, Gillette, American Express) is essential for sustained success.“
- Warren Buffett (2007?)
This in itself is a reason for us to raise while we wanted to stick with bootstrap. We are profitable since the start, but none of us has time to do or wants to do this stupid promotion stuff. Why do I need to become 'a rockstar' to promote a SaaS products? Can't people who like it not just use it without needing some kind of 'persona' behind it? I don't know and couldn't care less who are behind the saas products we use; as long as they are useful we pay, when they are not anymore, we stop paying.
So glad I have an income stream not dependent on this or I would surely starve and I really feel for those currently reluctantly going through the self-promotion grinder. But I cannot do self-promotion and so no sales and no reviews for my latest masterpiece.
However I am content enough that I am currently writing another, and happy to stay a failure rather than go through the crap-fest that is social media.
I am sure one day in a far-flung future someone or something will read my books and appreciate them.