This 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.

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.

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 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.

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.