In late 2015 I got an exciting job1 as a head of post production for a creative studio that produced interactive documentaries. At the time I joined, the company was new and running off of loans and private investment, so we had a lot of freedom: we were coming up with new projects, shooting and editing footage daily, throwing things on the wall to see if they stick and if they didn’t, finding the results very interesting.
Obviously the company ran out of money. Around the beginning of 2018 we downsized to one of those closet-sized shared office spaces, and by the middle of the year I was reduced to part-time or infrequent work, until finally let go.
The company restructured, though, and contacted me around January of 2020: could I come back? They had learned how to monetize a card game based on one of their video series, and were finally profitable.
I ignored the advice of my career-counselor mother, who always told me, “You can never go back once the relationship is over.” I told myself that it was a different company now, with a specific monetization model and a plan rather than dreams and good will. I went back and worked there until January of 2022, at which point I was laid off a second time from the same job because the card games sales didn’t remain profitable.
The reason I loved the job the first time was because the stuff we were making was novel, exciting, and above all meaningful. But it took literally all of my creative energy and left me with zero IP of my own. During the time I worked there, I never made any short films. I never wrote any scripts. I never edited narrative work.
Over six years I edited over 700+ videos, dozens of peripherals, and yet when I sat down to make my reel and find another job, I had maybe ten usable seconds to show what my work was all about.
But one long-term benefit the job did compensate me with was a very clear look into the asymmetric power of platforms over content creators, knowledge I feel must be made clear to everyone who participates so that they can avoid some regrets themselves.
One of the videos I edited for that company has over 30million views on YouTube. For comparison, about the same amount of people watched Oppenheimer in domestic US box office.
Even better, our engagement was so outstanding that YouTube Studios themselves contacted us to talk about it and learn how it drove behaviors on the platform. I can’t tell you how many times I saw people’s mouths drop as we described how our videos had 80% average completion rates — back in 2016, that was unheard of for videos longer than a minute. Ours were normally over 10 minutes and often as long as a half hour.
Our views-to-likes ratios were good, our dislikes were nigh-nonexistent, and YouTube Studios couldn’t stop telling us how excited they were about our likes-to-subscribe ratios. In short, in every way imaginable, people were finding our work, they were staying on our videos for far longer than normal, they were following up with subscriptions, they were liking and commenting and sharing and everyone involved was like “This shit is great and you know what’s even better? That it’s for content that really improves people’s lives!”
I can sincerely attest that it has changed lives, because I’ve read the emails and comments and I’ve spoken to people who have told me it has changed their lives. It’s changed my life, it changed how I communicated and it helped me come out of my shell and I still play the card games sometimes with friends and loved ones.
So there you go. I’ve had a hugely successful career, right?
Do you want to know how much money 30million views earned my company from YouTube monetization? About eight thousand dollars. Total. Over a 5 year span.
A production of a video costs more than $2000. A production of 700+ videos obviously more than that. There was my salary to consider, plus my coworkers’, plus my boss’, plus the production costs, equipment, insurance, locations, business costs… &c.
Total YouTube income across the entire channel was about $2-3000 per month from millions of monthly YouTube views. Remember that YouTube themselves were ecstatic how well these videos did in keeping people on their site. Our company made unicorn quality content and YouTube valued it enough to call us up and consult on it, but not enough to pay rent on our office or update our computers.
When the company pivoted to merchandising rather than videos, the videos stopped being the product, and started becoming the promotional content for the product. That forced our focus toward tweaking the videos to best promote the product, rather than to be the best video, and of course that meant that we had to exert all of our energies into marketing the merchandise rather than coming up with new projects, new stories, new experiments.
The company I worked for was driven by a belief that as long as the content was good and meaningful, as long as it touched lives and changed minds, as long as it had its real base of devoted fans and followers, the rewards would follow.
It turns out goodwill and enthusiastic engagement is not enough. The rewards went to YouTube, not to our company; and then later when we sold merchandise, the budget largely went to Facebook ad buys rather than creating new and diverse work.
I worked for six years trying to build something meaningful with a group of artists and all the revenue was taken by Alphabet and Meta. With all that experience pulling digital levers in the pursuit of impact and reach, the only metric I’ve found reliable is how much I get paid.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
I don’t want to get involved with Substack Discourse for two major reasons: one, I just wanna make my movies, man. Secondly, very few of my subscribers to Indulging a Second Look are on Substack Notes or really care about what Substack is. I could be delivering to them via MailChimp or Ghost or Beehiiv or whatever, it doesn’t make a difference to them.
I would have preferred coming up with another eldritch tale, or sending the word ‘regret’ through a few generative models and glitching and layering the result into some composition or another. What I have not yet done for a Symposium is any of these personal essay, hot take sorta pieces.
But this topic got stuck in my craw, and my attempts at different genres for the Regret Symposium felt like I was ignoring or hiding something I was deeply feeling, rather than contemplating on and drawing out the theme.
I can’t post something I can’t believe in. So unfortunately here I am, dipping my toes in the Discourse:
wrote a post entitled “No one buys books” that took testimonials from publishers during the anti-trust trial of the Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger and worked the numbers backward to show that most published work sells very little and the industry is held aloft by ~50 superstar authors and back catalog classics such as this literary epic you may have heard of.On Substack, this sent off a flurry of responses that were more or less along the lines of either “Well I buy books and so should you!” or “Yeah so actually here are better numbers and context, and this is just how prestige industries work.”
‘s response “Yes, People Do Buy Books” took the lead and is the best follow-up if you’re genuinely interested in the operands of the publishing industry. The pairing of these two posts create a nice dialog of what writers should expect if they’re thinking of getting into the publishing world and its very high risk for disappointment.The two posts have even become something of an inter-Notes Substack meme:
However, arguing over publisher sales numbers doesn’t really address the true premise of Elle’s argument. Her essay didn’t strike me as being interested in the health or demise of publishing itself so much as arguing for the opportunities in digital, mostly self-publication:
Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?
Technically, it does exist. Kindle Unlimited is the largest, followed by Scribd. Audible isn’t quite all-access, but then Spotify got into audiobooks and made them so. But none of these players have quite taken off the way Netflix or Spotify has. That’s for one reason: The Big Five publishing houses refuse to let their authors participate.
The publishing industry would die, that’s for sure. But I’d be willing to bet writers would get their books read way more.
[…]
Personally, I could not be more grateful to skip the publishing houses altogether and write directly for my readers here, being supported by those who read this newsletter rather than by a publishing advance that won’t ultimately translate to people reading my work.
Sounds amazing, right? The gatekeepers are removed, you get a LOT more readers who are only paying $10 for infinite books rather than $30 for a single hardcover that may not even be profitable to the publisher.
Only that’s exactly the model Netflix and Spotify have used to transfer wealth away from creative workers to executives, hollowing out the film and music industries to mere shadows of their former selves. Literal labor strikes have been fought over reversing the trends of undercutting creative workers by devaluing their work as a ‘feed’ of ‘content’ rather than units of artwork worthy of their own individual swing at the fences of the marketplace.
It’s a bad thing that the Big Five publishers are the only thing standing between the same thing happening to books. Firstly, that’s cartel behavior, so we don’t want that. Secondly, authors should have broader choices as to the means and formats they publish to. Most importantly, we can’t rely on businesses to self-regulate long term, the war for market parity must be fought on the consumer, labor, and regulatory levels.
No, the real response to Elle Griffin’s post isn’t Lincoln Michel’s post. It’s
‘s post on gamification of the US economy:All the things a gamified world promises in the short term — pride, purpose, meaning, control, motivation, and happiness — it threatens in the long term. It has the power to seclude people from reality, and to rewrite their value systems so they prioritize the imaginary over the real, and the next moment over the rest of their lives.
Digital platforms make content so easy to post, so effortless and frictionless, and then so immediately gratifying with its subscribers and likes and comments and shares, that a ton of artists are really selling themselves short by not aspiring higher.
Then, when they get met with an entire platform mechanism of pulleys and buttons and advice and how-to’s, they get distracted chasing the platform’s incentives rather than their own.
Finally when they start feeling the weight of the Pareto curve bearing down, they start moving the goal posts from “Substack advises I get at least 1000 subscribers before I set up my paid account announcement post”, to “At least I’ve found 40 dedicated people who are my true fans,” and it becomes self-justification and deception to ward off the very scary potential of pain and disappointment.
“Well I’m not making money, but it’s not about the money,” is true for some cohort of writers online who make their money writing or some other creative work elsewhere. It’s not true if you really honestly aim to make your artwork a vocation and hoping things just work out. I’ve seen businesses die and creators burn out over digital content, regardless of the quality of their work, and their lack of staying power has always been a lack of pricing power.
And at the same time I’ve seen people manage to “make it” full time despite the fact their work sucks. Their staying power has always been their pricing power.
And that’s how you end up with meaningless nosh in Notes like this:
That’s a statement that transfers the energy from disappointment to progress despite the fact it gives you no useable information on how to progress or requires any effort. You get all the sweet feel of accomplishment and you didn’t do anything! These platitudes and thousands like it are littered across the Internet, keeping creative people pressing the dopamine levers while telling other people, “I’m just excited to put myself out there.”
This depresses their own wages, but it also depresses the wages of everyone else. Regardless of platforms and incentives, if the supply of content is infinite and the demand for it is finite, the price of content approaches zero. If you put your work up for free, you are charging $0/word for your work, and that makes $0/word your base rate.
When audiences have infinite free content, they aren’t paying for curated stuff. If they can get every published book for $9.99, they will never buy your book. You may end up with a thousand Kindle downloads, more than John Kennedy Toole got in his lifetime. But they’re not reading that download because they’re reading A Confederacy of Dunces instead, as its more proven by the test of time. Their subscription money is going to Amazon, not you. Are you satisfied, as a writer, to give years of your work over to driving more engagement to Amazon and a dead author?
I’m not new to this conversation. I’ve made this point in various conversations, in various groups, before, and I definitely get a lot of pushback. One of the most popular pushbacks reads something like this:
It’s not the money that matters, it’s getting the work in front of the right audience, the true fans that will advocate for your work and support you. The purpose is the work, not the money: if you chase the money, you’ll always be looking for what you think the audience wants rather than giving them something new: you.
In arts communities across time, or at least since the Industrial Revolution, the debate between art as a value unto itself versus art as a commodity that can be sold in a marketplace has been ongoing. Gone from the Discourse are debates about selling out, but that’s largely because the structure of the markets have changed.
I believe most people are operating under the impression that by giving their work away for free, they’re investing in the benefit of the community — there is such stuff as folk art, punk art, underground art that strives to bring people together using values that transcend mere economics. You can’t put a price on beauty, belonging, or meaning.
The problem with this view is that the Internet is not the Commons. At one point it used to be a distributed network of self-hosted content where a website was a user owned and operated space. That changed with Web 2.0 and social media and streaming, where companies developed user-generated content platforms.2
All of these platforms necessarily monetized your content. They wouldn’t exist as businesses if they didn’t have something to sell. They sell your data to advertisers or have you pay for placement, they charge fees for their use or a percentage of your sales, these days many of them, even Substack, are gladly sucking up your work to train AI so that they can replace your content with auto-generated content and charge you to use their generative tools.
How valuable is the work we’re collectively giving AI models? Marc Andreessen prices the collective value of the corpus of online intellectual property at a few trillion dollars when he argues in a public statement to the US Copyright Office that enforcing copyright on LLMs would destroy his investments3. And his argument is based the long-held Silicon Valley argument that recognizing traditional IP law would make their platforms collapse in value.
In short, if you post on a platform rather than your own hosted, operated, and owned website, you’re providing the platforms your IP to monetize. You’ve sold out. The difference between you selling out to Facebook or Substack or X, and a 90s punk band selling out to a major record label and going pop, is that the 90s punk band got a sweet contract and could buy a house. You sold out for nothing.
Or more appropriately, you sold out for a few dopamine hits you would have earned by doing the work in the Commons in the first place, but the platform was easier and frictionless and less threatening to failure.
Furthermore, I’m not arguing that money is the only metric. Following any box-office returns shows the biggest films aren’t really the most artful. I’m not saying that success is measured by how much money you’re making; I’m saying that you should be extremely wary of metrics that don’t direct you toward pricing and selling your work. The more direct the metric to monetization, the more useful; thus the actual money coming in is the most direct metric.
The promises platforms make are always the same: if you upload your work here for free, people will find it, and then after they fall in love with it [mumble mumble] and you’ll be a famous writer artist filmmaker performer influencer. In that way you evade the gatekeepers and talk to your audience directly.
It’s not a lie, but it’s very much a misdirect.
Firstly, all of these content platforms have the same Pareto curve of traditional media and publishing: very very few creators get all the cash, the rest get very little. I suspect for all of the digital content platforms, the Pareto curve is thinner, higher, and worse: LESS people make it big, and most of the people who don’t don’t even make enough to buy groceries with.
Elle’s post points out that the Big Five publishers use their best-sellers to subsidize the rolls of the dice on other, newer talent. In digital publishing it’s the reverse. The platforms use the unpaid labor of millions of creative workers uploading their content for free to attract an audience base, and then funnels that audience’s payments to their own pockets and a few best-sellers. How is that better?
For instance, Spotify lets anybody upload music, but musicians don’t get paid until they’ve attracted at least 1000 streams per year. People subscribe to Spotify so that they can have access to every musician’s work, but the money they spend there doesn’t go to every musician they listen to; it goes to Spotify and about 14% of the artists on there, with only a few hundred making millions of dollars, and those hundreds of millionaire artists are largely just some Swedish dude.
Is that really how you’d like publishing to work?
The other issue with the “don’t worry about the money, just find your audience” is that audiences aren’t equal. I don’t have to argue numbers on that, all I have to do is ask you to consider how you hold your attention on the following things:
A book you bought.
A book you borrowed.
A periodical you pay for.
A newsletter you pay for.
A newsletter that’s free.
A social media account.
This list has separate hierarchies embedded into it.
Top to bottom, this is a list of attentiveness people give to things. Bottom to top, this is a list of potential reach — number of people who will come across it. Uncorrelated to any order would be the quality of writing — a Facebook, Notes, or X post can be as well written and insightful as a book.
But, top to bottom, this is a list of how directly the writer gets paid for their work. All other writing quality equal, less people pay more money to pay closer attention to less but better packaged and curated content. The further down the list you go, the more people will see your thing exists, care about it far less, and be less willing to pay for it.
They will remember it less, they will discuss it less, it will impact them less, and they will treasure it less.
Would you rather get paid $20,000 and get only about 12 readers per year, or $0 and get 1000 subscribers, only about 200 of which open the emails, leaving about 66 which finish reading them, of which about 12 actually read and contemplated rather than scanned?
That’s not real data, but I’m confident in its generalization. Reflect on your own cognitive biases and habits around the art and culture you consume, what you choose to pay for and what you don’t, and you’ll see what I’m saying. Readers of this essay spend more money on movie tickets than Patreons for YouTube creators, even the ones that don’t go see movies and love YouTube browsing.
As far as Substack goes as a platform, its monetization and revenue sharing is relatively fair. Substack doesn’t make money unless you make money,4 and readers subscribe to specific Substacks to support specific writers rather than pay Substack to dispense per click view like comment completion rate whatever. Its model is closest to my favorite platform’s model, which is BandCamp: the musicians or labels charge whatever they want, BandCamp takes 30% off of album sales or 15% off of merchandise.5 Substack takes 10%. Very fair!
But if you look at the top-earning Substacks of all time, a quick glance shows three important things:
Most of these authors have been traditionally published before joining Substack, and even while on Substack still publish through traditional channels.
Most of these Substacks are journalism or have narrow topical scope. They’re not so much about the writer’s work as a specific project that writer is doing. Those writers have other projects, often on other platforms, or other writing clients.
Most importantly for whom this essay is directed at, not one of them is a Substack for creative writing.
Even when I consider which Substacks I ultimately subscribe to, usually it’s creative writers I know personally or one of the above types of Substacks written by a time-tested professional writing on a specific theme. I have found a few creative writers I’ve subscribed to on Substack based entirely off of the quality of their work, but it’s a very small fraction and I unsubscribe often when I need to purge and collate my emails.
My guess is that many people reading this do that too, even if they’re loath to admit it.
Substack has about 2million paid subscribers, but what’s not broken down in those numbers is how many pay for creative writing versus advocacy, editorial, and journalistic writing. Data like that is important to know when you consider the true size of what pools of potential income you’re tapping into.
Elle Griffin is a major advocate for Substack and her follow up post “Substack could create the future of books” shows that she definitely has more in mind than just evading the Big Five gatekeepers. Her work is monetized and she sells physical books. She really is using the platform successfully.
In this specific post she advocates for ways that Substack pages could become marketplaces and playlists for books, much like how YouTube enabled marketplace listings under video.6 (By the way, The Soaring Twenties Social Club Substack already has a bookseller page. Be the change you want to see &c.) Similarly, Substack Notes Discourse is full of ways in which the platform could improve discoverability7, promote fiction better in the fiction leaderboard, provide better user controls, yadda yadda yadda.
These are great conversations to have and its good that users advocate for better service. Substack is far more responsive than other platforms to these suggestions and this responsiveness is one big reason why I chose this platform over others.
But.
There’s a saying in New York that is useful to think about when you consider what a platform really is: “Your landlord is not your friend.” Sometimes you can have really great relationships with your landlord. Sometimes there’s good communication, mutual respect, and aligned incentives. But in the end, no matter how good it gets, the landlord is extracting rent from you that you pay for shelter, and if you don’t pay the rent they remove the shelter.
The thing about platforms is that they are digital real estate: rather than self-hosting your personal owned and operated website, they are giving you a ‘space’ and extracting some kind of rent from it. In the end, if how you use that space is not profitable to them, they will remove that usage or find a different way to profit from it. Or they will go out of business.
Furthermore their ownership can change. SongTradr bought BandCamp, Elon Musk bought Twitter, Substack is funded in part by private equity. You can’t pearl clutch over KKR's purchase of Simon & Schuster without understanding that your favorite Internet platforms hold the exact same risks. You might have a great relationship with your landlord, only for the building to get bought out by Blackstone.
Okay. I’m done beating up on Substack. Because I do use it, and post content there for free, and complaining only gets so far before we start talking about what to do with this predicament.
To sum up:
Digital platforms get you caught up chasing all these little levers that more often take you further and further away from the goal of actually supporting your vocation with income or resources brought by dedicated audiences.
Most platforms benefit from that cognitive dissonance, letting artists exchange creative labor for dopamine hits while funneling any actual revenues to themselves and enough top-performing users to keep the dopamine fiends chasing the dream.
Even the more benevolent platforms, such as BandCamp and Substack, represent tall and narrow Pareto curves that depress wages across the base.
As commercial bases they may not be reliable to your interests long term or attract the pool of money open to your work.
But you can build a business out of those tools provided you use the right ones and structure your strategy towards acquiring the resources necessary for you to succeed, wherein success = your creative work as a vocation.
For example, what got me into the concept of newsletters in the first place, which eventually lead me to Substack8, were writer newsletters like Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations and John Scalzi’s Whatever.
Both of these professional writers love having their own space to export all of the mind-detritus and cast-asides that accumulates from writing stuff for pay, as well as promote themselves, tinker in public, expand their audience, and own their own content.
Scalzi’s was a true bottom-up operation: “Whatever” is so named because he can post whatever he wants, but also it’s his own website owned and operated so that he can refer people to his work and show them that he knows how to write. It’s always been free, he’s updated it damn nigh daily for 18 years, but it’s resulted in tons of income via the other writing opportunities that he’s brought in from that resource.
Ganzeer is another example. He sees his website as a central hub for hosting and archiving all of his work, regardless of whether it’s visible to the public. With all the projects he creates across media digital and analog, his website is a tool for managing it and marketing it. It’s basically a CMS with a marketing system attached.
As a filmmaker I have to show my work. I have an editing reel, I have short films, and I make experimental shorts released on Substack. The Internet provides me space to reference that work so that I can show it to other people.
The thing I want to relay here is that the Internet isn’t where to find the people to show the work. I send people online to view my work, I don’t send online people to view my work.
I’ve come to remove my short films from YouTube entirely and place it behind passwords and hidden links on Vimeo, because those platforms aren’t the right distribution channels9. My films are accessible to anyone who asks me for them; that’s all the discovery and opportunity I really need as I seek out resources to make movies I can sell and markets where I can sell them.
In my head my distributed works should drive some people to my Substack and my Substack should drive some people to my distributed works10. For the most part I would expect the Substack to be a far narrower ‘audience’ than the total potential audience for my work. For one thing Substack doesn’t even have movie leaderboards and it seems to be under the impression that video is used predominantly for podcasts, so I can’t expect a meaningfully large and dedicated audience here yet.
But even if that situation improved, I’d really hate to imagine this place as the primary platform. Pursuing Substack discoverability, reach, and subscriptions would interfere with current opportunities and likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I think you should see free digital content as a marketing cost. On a ledger it would be placed as expenses rather than revenue.
The deluge of free digital content is not reversible. I don’t think I’ve ever actually convinced someone who has chosen the digital content path to step off and find better paying work, so convincing EVERYONE to do it is not going to happen. And AI companies are firing up generative algorithms to flood us with even more.
So it goes.
What I am saying is, a common meme about regret is finding yourself at the end of your life having not done the thing you wanted to do.
I want you to do the thing you want to do regardless of audience or income potential. But I do want you to consider whether digital platforms deserve that work from you, for free, to their profit. Why should that thing you want to do drive clicks for Mr. Beast? Or support Taylor Swift’s Spotify residuals? Why does YouTube or Spotify or even BandCamp and Substack deserve larger user bases from your work?
Just keep your eyes open and build the economic model for your vocation. Plan to monetize and budget it out. Use the metrics that seem most helpful in driving monetization and completely ignore the rest as trash data. Ignore the feel-good memes and use periods of rejection, disappointment, and frustration to consider what you’re really expecting, if those expectations are reasonable, and if you’re taking the right path to meet them.
A creative person should always rattle the knobs on the other doors in the hallway in case they’re actually open: suck up and submit some stuff to the gatekeepers. Ask around for other publishing opportunities. Look at festivals, community markets, grants, residencies, and contests. Research and browse curated market guides. Get outside of your own social network and search the web for other communities, particularly cooperatives, forums, and groups. Spend about as much time finding where your work belongs, as writing the work itself.
And advocate for yourself. Know your worth. Know, at a basic level, that you hold the copyright to your own efforts and that by giving it away for free, you’re driving the market rate for everyone’s intellectual efforts to zero.
There is more to the world than the Big Five / self-publishing binary. Institutionalized centralization of culture is one side of a vice grip squeezing resources out of artists; digital platforms’ deluge of free content are the other. Being caught between those two choices will only crush you when other options are available.
Robust support of creative work and intellectual property requires owning your own content and building your own networks, collaborating and cooperating with others, sometimes building new publishing channels and new markets, and paying for and sponsoring other people’s work.
No single person can do all of that work alone, so the only way for us to extricate ourselves from the centralized conglomerates and the centralized platforms is to build and participate in distributed cooperatives, folk spaces, regional and local markets, dedicated mailing lists, and user-moderated forums.
Your work only maintains its impact if it also provides the resources for your next work. There’s no process for this that doesn’t require time, effort, and tenacious self-advocacy.
Impacting culture with your work starts with recognizing your value.
This essay was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Regret.”
If you are a writer, you might consider joining us.
I will not be naming the company here as I still, to this day, believe in the work I did then, the work they do now, and believe my investment into that company was net positive for me.
Shorting Marc Andreessen seems like reason alone to enforce copyright claims, though.
Yet.
BandCamp’s model is so fair big corporate labels hate it because they don’t want to give a platform 30% of their revenues. Easier to make a deal with Spotify to funnel the subscription moneys from people who are on the streams to listen to indie bands. Thus I can’t get my friends enthusiastic about BandCamp because “BandCamp doesn’t have popular music.”
My creative studio job was an early adopter of the YouTube marketplace listings and I recall they were decent in pushing card game sales, but not as great as we’d’ve liked. If it worked out great we could have then focused on the quality of the work and let the cards sell themselves, but it wasn’t enough and we still had to pay for paid ads etc.
There’s no movies leaderboard!
which eventually lead me to Soaring Twenties
Disclosure: I am exploring turning on Vimeo rentals, so it might be the right distribution channel after all. But I’m looking to do that after I have exhausted other options.
In this sense I’m not yet talking about commercial film distribution but rather ‘the various places my work shows up around the world’, but the idea is definitely to decrease the scattershot distributions and increase the commercial film distribution.
Wow, lots to unpack here. First of all, thanks for putting this together. It must've taken a lot of time. I hope you were fairly compensated! ;) This piece is timely for me, as I've recently made an unheralded return to Substack and Medium. I'm rethinking writing online (and writing in general, to be honest).
I've spent the last few years working on novels. Drafted one novel, put that down, drafted a different novel, put that down, started redrafting the first novel, and now I'm working on a third novel. It's been a lonely, Sisyphean effort. At the height of my despair, I came across the Elle Griffin post you referenced (or I guess the first one you referenced). The piece wasn't revelatory, but the facts laid bare one after the other were...disquieting. The silver lining was that it clarified something I've been feeling for a while: I can't put all my eggs in one basket.
So, I'm revisiting online platforms, but I'm also rethinking my overall presence online -- my, er, personal brand, if you will -- including my website, which hitherto has existed as a static mini portfolio. One interesting non-novel-related thing happened in these intervening years: I created a website that served sort of as a repository for castoff research I'd done for my first novel. I populated it with some content, set up a newsletter sign-up form, and then pretty much left it alone. A couple of years later, I checked out the back end on a whim. This website had, with no encouragement, quietly captured 100 subscribers and was consistently attracting about 1,000 visitors a month -- not numbers that will knock anyone's socks off but not bad for no time investment, apart from some SEO work I'd done at the outset. Set it and forget it.
Which brings me back to the notion of a cohesive online presence. A few years ago, I published a piece on Medium about gun control, far and away my most "successful" post, drawing thousands of readers, most of them irate. I was contacted by an editor of a newspaper in Colorado (forget which one), who asked for permission to republish. Another few thousand readers. All told, I earned 44 bucks. What really ruffled my feathers, however, is that I didn't build MY audience. Sure, I got some new followers on Medium, but it's not like they were subscribed to my newsletter (not sure if Medium had implemented that functionality back then). I didn't have their emails. It didn't do anything for me long-term.
I don't have a definitive strategy yet, but I know it includes my website, capturing email, and directing traffic with intention. Anyway, I've taken up enough of your time. I should've just written a post of my own. Clearly, your piece stirred up a lot! I appreciate you writing it.
This is one of the most lucid takes on what’s happening right now to artists and creators. I’ve been struggling with a lot of what you mention here for awhile now. But your piece has made it clear that it’s not a matter of “should” I move my work to my own domain but rather “when”