In defense of self-promotion

Let me start with a generous block quote from FdB:

Anyway: what’s essential to understand is that people knew that not everywhere could have the reach of the NYT, that not everywhere could reliably produce a giant audience. But there was the potential for pieces, even pieces in entirely obscure publications, to surface. Pieces that didn’t emerge from highfalutin publications or from popular writers could find their way out of the cacophony of the internet and become the topic of widespread conversation. Someone quietly working on a niche Wordpress.org blog could make the right argument at the right time and see their name crisscross the internet. And I just don’t see that happening anywhere right now.

I am blessed to be in a situation where I no longer need to actively self promote. I get an average of three new free subscribers a day with essentially no self-promotion work. This is due to organic growth and Substack advertising my work because I’m already somewhat popular. I’m fine with that growth curve. Not all authors have that luxury. Instead, they have to self-promote.

I don’t think most people realize how possible it is to have dozens of high(ish) quality essays on the web and no readers. I notice people in this situation and sometimes (not as often as I should) try to give a leg-up. I’ve been there. “Build it and they will come” simply isn’t true on the internet. Look at Free Splains by Splainer, which according to Substack has “tens” of subscribers:

https://splained.substack.com

I may not agree with everything Splainer says, but his fifty or so readers and a combined total of twelve likes for nineteen well-written, thoughtful essays makes my point. Being a good writer is not good enough- advertising is essential.

It is hard, by definition, to count the obscure. Yet I suspect “build it and they will come” has never been true, and the bland self-assurance great writing will always find an audience has always been false. I suspect history is littered with forgotten great writers. And that’s just the great ones. As for good writers who never got a substantial audience? I suspect vastly more than not fall into this category. And of those good writers, who knows how many might have become great if they’d had the scope to practice writing for an audience and receiving criticism. Probably countless more than ranks of the actual, great canonical writers. Any author who doesn’t want to become an (unknown) statistic needs to become their own merchant & advocate.

Every self-promoter is trying to assert your rights. They are trying to assert that everyone- and that includes you- has a right to circulate their words in the hope they’ve said something genuinely important, will be recognized as such, and will subsequently gain a deserved audience. Suppose that, tomorrow, you had what you thought was a jolly good idea about politics, society, or even history or economics. You would want the opportunity for that thought to be heard- right? And you wouldn’t want that hearing to be contingent on knowing a guy who knows a guy- right? If yes, then self-promoters are in your corner. And even if you’re convinced that you’ll never in a million years think of anything that needs to be put in print and read, do you really want not even to have the option to take your ideas public? It is not from their benevolence that the self-promoter pushes their work to be sure, but from their self-interest, nonetheless, they are sticking up for us.

But where to go to get the word out? Twitter? You have to be obscenely lucky or a humungous account on Twitter to get any traction for your articles- that means at least 10,000 followers plus. One of the most depressing things about Twitter, even before the Musk takeover, was that it’s no longer possible to make it big there unless you’re already big. Even for those handful of new accounts that ‘make it’ and get a lot of followers, the skills of a great essayist or fiction writer are very different to the skills of a great Tweeter.

Facebook? Instagram? All the big players have set up their algorithms to deemphasize external links. In my view, algorithms that deprioritize external links should be banned as a form of anti-competitive behavior. But at the moment- they’ve won. The internet is now down to six sites that don’t even cross-link that much. Well done everyone.

What about publishing in an established venue to build up a profile? I don’t know what this is like in general, but leftwing media is saturated. You basically have to know someone IRL, and the major publications barely even bother concealing it. Back when I tried this, no one was interested in even getting a sniff of what I wrote. I’ve heard Jacobin might be relatively good with this stuff, but with the publications I’ve tried it’s gone nowhere. I’ve written about my bitter feelings about this and related here:

Whence nepotism?

What about Reddit? That’s probably your best bet, but increasingly the rule is no self-promotion meaning no sharing anything you’ve written. The politics subreddit only allows submissions from an approved list of domains- basically just mainstream news sites. Even where self-promotion is allowed, people sneer at it, and it’s often subject to weird and convoluted rules. This last thing, the weird and convoluted rules, I understand to a degree- self promotion has to be regulated- but you always feel like such a criminal when you do it.

Okay, so it’s hard to self-promote on today’s internet. Who cares? You should. If you want a democratic internet where everyone has a chance to be seen and get attention for their ideas, we need self-promotion. That means some blogspam. That means putting up with earnest 19 year olds sharing links along the lines of “I wrote this- thoughts???” and giving them a chance to develop themselves. If you force them away, you are certifying that you are happy with media monopolies and venal frenemy networks of writers deciding who gets their name in print. Do you know what hack editors and media monopolists are like? I’ve met 12 of the former and never met but vividly imagined many of the latter. You’re basically supporting this:

Anyway. If you’re a naïve bastard like me and you think everyone deserves a chance at a mass hearing then you should at least tolerate blogspam and other forms of self-promotion in good humor and, ideally, if you think it’s good, perhaps give it a bit of a hand. It’s not just their right, it’s yours.