#154 - Selling Myself

I'm really bad at self-promotion.

(For context, I'm saying this in an essay that I don't plan to send to the list of people who have signed up (on their own accord completely unforced) to receive essays from me.)

There is something so icky to me about treating myself as a product, but because my work is so personal that feels like The Option That I Have. It's not, but resisting it takes so much effort. Do I want to "grow an audience" or do I just want to feel like I'm not literally shouting into the void of the internet after I've taken the time to record my thoughts into words?

The thing about "growing an audience" is that I think it's kind of terrible to look at interaction with art through numbers. And the numbers that They (the websites who run these publishing platforms) give you are mmmm creepy. Turning people's behavior into data – and then giving that data to me for whatever analysis I want to do with it, broke something in my brain when it first happened.

This website really just gives me open rates and a list of links that got clicked. Minimal invasiveness. Substack was wayyyy more loose with their data, so I had to learn to resist it.

Some publishers will even tell you when people stopped reading your work.

And I think that sucks!

It makes writers then have to choose whether to shorten their pieces and change their style, or forge ahead for the folks that did make it to the end. And that number by the way is never ever touted or focused on, despite the fact that there is clearly an audience for the original style!

I got given feedback that I should include a TLDR with my essays and like – as someone who just published 4500+ words on how much I hate Ice ASMR restock videos, I do get the note.

But also I'm not just trying to make a point.

<< Dustin Hoffman voice >> Hey, I'm writing here!

And I really don't mind if people don't finish, or wait to read three in a row, or save the long ones for train rides, or hate my writing, or think it should be shorter. That's fine! If they want to go write something that more attuned to their preferences, I think they should I think that's great I think more people should write! My style? Long winded! Never not once been described as anything less than a chatterbox. Kissed the Blarney Stone before I could even talk babe I've got ancestral levels of yappin' to do!

Audiences are great to have. Without them, everything is rehearsal and at some point you do have to put your work forth for new witnesses. Who may or may not have reviews.

But I don't want to write to my imaginary future critics taste. I don't like the idea of making art The Most Pallatable It Can Be for every single person. I get that my walls of text are challenging for some people, but maybe it's good to be challenged! Maybe it's good to copy a paragraph from a website into a word processor and break it up with your own line breaks. Have it read out loud by a friend! Get in there and make your own choices of which lines should be bold, paste it in a font that weights the letters to make them more legible, have a ball!

No one has enough time for meaningful engagement and most "content" isn't asking for active participation from the audience.

Everything is made to be as passive as possible in order for the net to stay wide.

And opinions invite harassment because everyone online seems to think centrist is the best position to be in. We're all obsessed with being perfect and having the "correct" opinion that having conversations around other possibilities feel heavily monitored by outsiders. It's exhausting engaging in bad faith opinions/questions so I get why most people are adverse to the idea.

But that means that we've let those with the worst opinions be the loudest and only voices in the room, so now Disney is having fan panels decide if they've gone too woke or not and I wish that sentence didn't exist.

But it does of course it does because we don't talk about the impact of GamerGate on the culture but all of the violent incel-based misogyny is happening in discords and video game servers that have never bothered to moderate anything on their platforms and now women are dying and men are "lonely" and I'm supposed to care about the latter more than the former because have I considered that if they weren't lonely maybe they wouldn't be so inclined to kill us?

Like, don't worry, men will suddenly think of women as people when they meet the "right" woman who will simply be so amazing as to wash their misogynistic tendencies away. It definitely does not endanger literally every other woman they interact with to hold this belief!

This is turning into just me griping, but maybe that's okay and maybe that's the point and it's certainly the point of this week where I'm letting it all out because it's just for me!

Everyone has the urge to self-censor and only post thoughts and images they think will be Approved Of because the internet is about capturing the closest thing to your perfect self because ew who wants to display their messy selves and put their vulnerability forth for judgement by unselected random committee? So the internet has become deeply inhumane.

It ranges from small things like snark pages using unflattering stills captured from a video (where human faces make human expressions) to deepfake porn. Strangers popping into comment sections with unsolicited advice or opinions, because we're all just speaking out loud to no one in particular which means the internet is all projection because language develops in particular ways and comment sections invite aggrandizement because leaving a "your wedding was beautiful!" feels like a slap in the face next to dozens of "BEST DAY EVER! BEST COUPLE IN EXISTENCE I WANT TO CRY JUST THINKING ABOUT IT!" statements. So everything is heightened, and if everyone really thought about every single pop culture instance they swear they think of every single day there wouldn't be room for other thoughts throughout the day.

It's advertising talk. Because we're advertising our thoughts. And then marketing opinions to each other. And I'm supposed to be as good at that part of the process than the other part.

The thing with personal brands? They're narrow. They have to be. So people flatten themselves into a palatable and purchasable format and they literally are required to do that in order to like, sell their book to a traditional publisher because all marketing is outsourced and all of us have become personal brand managers and our client is ourselves.

You become known for a "thing" you pick a genre and stick to it you create a niche to develop a Smallest Viable Audience (a concept I think is net positive but still applies) and then you sell a product. Weirdly, what you need to develop for this to work is an understanding with your audience that they should support the hawking hustle coming their way. It's great that you got these brand deals, they're so proud of you for getting that #MakeFallSmallLikeGlade sponcon. Because we're not just brand managers, we're crisis management critics and we "understand" what we're seeing influencers do.

People dissect Public Relations as if it's a sport these days. They draft fake apologies for free for their favorite stars and hope that idk Tree Paine is going to be looking through Twitter to get ideas. And like, there are people who are absolutely paid to monitor twitter response from the fans in some way but not in the way these Fans think. Maybe it's just our version of water cooler talk because we're all too aware of what's going on behind the scenes so we can no longer enjoy for celebrity for what they present but rather how well they pull off the machinations of the show.

Maybe that's the problem – it's all too meta. It's why people feel the need to joke about doing sponcon. We know its embarrasing! The younger gen doesn't feel that way because it's so normalized to them. We used to have shame about filming in public and taking photos of food in public, and maybe less shame in general is good but now people get made at you for walking in front of their camera when they're filming in the subway. Like, no, that's too far. There's a healthy balance somewhere in there but we blew right past it and now people think its okay to listen to tiktoks without headphones on the bus.

Okay well, no wonder I don't like doing it – I'm far too conscious of the ramifications and the lack of control. Going viral is a nightmare. I want a word-of-mouth connection mostly and maybe some stumbling upon it via chance. I never post about anything using hashtags because I'm rarely interested in what people who are searching in the hashtags have to say. But now we have to "encourage" an audience and ask activating questions and uuuuughhhh it's so rarely sincere and it makes me feel like we're cheapening the general notion of what relationships are when half of the interactions we have are thinly veiled marketing opportunities!

I don't like contributing to it. I want people to read because they want to, not because they think they have to. I worry we're eroding our decision making abilities because we're all so burntout from all the terrible catch-22s and we just want to be relieved by being told what to do for once.

But in the vacuum of leadership, tech companies emerged, which are all based on advertisement sales because apparently marketing is the only industry that generates Real Money because capitalism crumbles without social pressure to keep up and purchase shit.

Anyway our attention spans are shot, pop psychology books repeat themselves for eight chapters to make page counts, and dopamine is addictive and these companies are fully willing to maniulate our brain chemistry to keep us consuming.

And that's bad! And I don't want to sell myself into this system I just want to make things and express myself and that would be fine but I feel the need to defend it in writing because not wanting fame isn't the norm and therefore requires explanation in order to become a fully-fleshed idea and not a knee-jerk reaction to "not being successful" as if we weren't raised on stories of artists who never knew of their cultural impact because it happened posthumously.

Create because you're human, not because the algorithm wants you to.