Category: sethwCategory: sethw

Making a living (or at least paying the rent) with a small, engaged email list is possible, even as people with massive social followings struggle to pay their phone bill.

As someone shared in our recent “BREAK UP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” Zoom call, a big social media following might look good (as in, vanity metrics), but “getting more followers” isn’t the answer, but rather making sure the thing you’re offering is something people actually want to pay for.

One thing about Substack is every newsletter you send is a “launch.” It’s to everyone, your whole audience! It can be intimidating, knowing that everything you write will be seen by 40% of the people you send it to.

Since I’ve set up this site, I find myself posting sometimes twice a day. It feels like my music blogging days, when I found an interesting band or quote, I’d dive into WordPress and just get something posted. That’s exactly what I’ve done today with this post!

Back in those days my music blog could get 5,000 visitors a day – hey, it was 2003!

Now, though, I can write on this site in relative “silence,” without thinking too much about typos or making sure each post is my absolute best.

So I was delighted when I found this quote from Tracy Durnell, (via the Josh Spector newsletter)

If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write. Blogs can help writers trick ourselves out of performance anxiety with lower stakes.

I think about it like this: you can do Morning Pages, which is private, and not for publication of course. Then there’s SENDING A NEWSLETTER. That’s public, that’s out there, it’s showtime!

The in-between is a blog.

It’s public, but… semi-public. Less public than let’s say Cory Doctorow, with his Pluralistic blog.

Have you seen him talk on stage for over an hour about Enshittification? He’s rattling off facts and figures and ideas like he’s reading from a script! Why? Because he writes so much everyday! He wrote a BOOK about it!

Go beyond the idea that you “need eyeballs” for your efforts to be worthwhile, and believe that writing about what you do in a lower stakes manner might be the best thing for your work.

Are you tired of working alone, shaking your fist at the internet in isolation?

MrBeast would spend 12+ hours a day on Skype talking with fellow YouTubers when he started out, hell bent on cracking the YouTube algorithm.

Those are two extremes, (isolation vs 12+ hour Skype calls) with plenty of room in between.

There are many ways to promote your work outside of social media. We promoted our work before the age of social media, and we’ll promote it long after those platforms are gone.

Who’s even on Twitter anymore?

Like, just a few short years ago it was practically law to be on Twitter, but now? Ew.

Same with Facebook.

These once mighty platforms are a laughing stock among the creative class.

“Post on the Facebook feed? AS IF!”

But nothing is black and white. If social media is working for you, and you have the bandwidth for it, great! Maybe you don’t need to be reading Social Media Escape Club, and that’s okay.

But if you’re tired, exhausted, burned out, if your mental health is affected by spending too much time on social media, it’s okay to make an exit!

You can have a career without social media! You can make art without posting!

Like Jes Raymond, who had an upcoming show to promote. Instead of posting about it on social media, she sent one email to a local paper and called a radio station.

“This past weekend, we had a little show up in a tiny town—St. Johnsbury. One of those places with a small newspaper. And I just decided that instead of making a bunch of social media posts about the show—especially to a town I don’t know—I’d do the human work.

I figured out who the journalist was at the local paper who writes the arts column. I wrote to them directly and sent them a press release. Then I found the local radio station—Vermont Public—and called them. I got our event on their calendar.

We ended up having about 150 people show up at this little church in a town I’d never played before.”

Is it easy? Nothing is easy! But its a big internet, it’s a big WORLD (not everyone is on Twitter! Or IG!), and I believe you can make a lot of things happen without ever posting on a social media platform again.

When you hear someone else doing something creative in a group setting, like painting, letter writing, or practicing their instruments, it gives you permission to start something similar for yourself, with people in your own creative orbit.

Hearing people talking about these gatherings on a Zoom call, or in person, is powerful, because you can hear the joy in their voice, and see it in their eyes. This is different than just reading about it, because you get to witness the energy in real time.