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Comment by obviouslynotme | Hacker News Reader

Computers and the Internet have democratized culture in a way never seen before. This is both good and bad. Newspapers are dying. Television is dying. Hollywood is dying. Books are dying. Now we have people co-creating on blogs, YouTube, self-publishing, and fan-fiction websites. The production quality is certainly down from the peak of professional culture, but software tools are helping individual creators gain an edge.

The consumer is absolutely winning right now. There is a lifetime of free diverse content just a click away. Traditional publishing and distribution cannot compete with that. The era when you could win a short story award and receive a decent advance on a novel to support yourself is going away, if not gone already.

The future model for all upcoming artists is going to be pushing out content for free for years while building up a fan base until your advertising and Patreon can sustain you.

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I can see this going round in another circle.

The key skill for creatives (in any medium) will be marketing. Being good at the thing you do is table-stakes. Being good at marketing to create the audience will be the key divider between profitable artist/musician/writer/etc and aspiring amateur.

So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.

This is basically what publishing houses & record labels do, but they're still so caught up in the actual physical production of stuff. Now everything is digital there's no actual need to make books or records.

There'll be a new set of "promoters" who handle the hottest new talent. Getting signed with one of them is the guarantee that you've "made it" and you might actually be able to make a living from this.

Then the promoters will be publishing their own collections of stuff, or creating their own subscription services, or finding some other way of cross-promoting their creatives to the audience of the other creatives they manage. Then it becomes a matter of choosing which promoter(s) you want to follow.

And then we're back to where we were, with gatekeepers for content.

If instagram is a model, then its already started. My feed is basically just guitars/bass/drums and motorcycles. There are these instagram pages who “promote” other pages who pay them. Once the creator is large enough they can decouple and let the feed algorithm work.

Same goes for meme pages, actual models/actors. My guess is this is nascent stage before it really becomes a dominant force for filtering/promoting content.

I fully agree. In fact, I think (hope) that most of the writers who are selling only hundreds of copies of their books are actually just bad marketers. I think this is why the myth of the Big Four publishing house exists, because those publishing houses used to come in and scoop the writer out of obscurity by marketing their book. Now they look for a writer who already has a big platform so they don't have to spend the marketing budget and can wind up with a "sure thing."

>So there's an opportunity for a good marketer to find a great creative (or vice versa) and strike a deal that allows the creative to focus on creating.

Well, that's basically what you hire a public relations person for. The problem is that now you're having to invest, perhaps significantly, in making a bigger impact.

There's a misalignment of incentives, though. Hiring a PR person is different from signing a contract with a promoter/publisher/marketing partner.

The PR person wants to be noticed by journalists. They get paid the same regardless of how much money the creative makes. But their next gig depends on being noticed by journalists.

The marketing partner wants to sell lots of whatever it is that the creative makes. They're on a % of sales (or more usually, it's the other way around and the creative earns royalties based on sales). They need to build an interested audience that they can then market to for other creatives.

The scariest part about the latter model is how the hell are we going to find any more Susanna Clarkes, J. D. Salingers, and any other author that doesn't want to or isn't able to buy into the parasocial nature of patreon and similar platforms? What if the author isn't hot, charismatic, or pleasant to listen to?

I don't look at Patreons that often, but if I think about the dozen or so that I have (maybe half of authors) none of them have had pictures of themselves on it, or audio recordings of themselves.

So, I mean, it takes being somewhat charismatic in writing, but of the other properties you list... I don't seem them as important at all. Moreover, being charismatic in writing seems to be practically a requirement for being a good author.

Nor is it like the previous model did not have biases, you needed to be good at selling yourself to publishing houses and the like instead of to readers directly, but you still needed to be good at selling yourself.

I used to be that way. I created social media accounts this year (and started writing this newsletter) because I realized it was the only way to get my work read. There are so many amazing books out there that only ever see a couple readers because they don't market. It's just a hard reality (unless readers decide to go all indie and hunt for obscure books on the internet, like I do. But I'm sure I'm in the minority).

My biggest fear with that is the opportunity cost. It’s hard to commit to a total unknown as it’s likely their writing will be a waste of time to read unless there’s some assurance it’s competent, interesting, and novel writing.

Where does one even start to find the next Pynchon for example?

> The consumer is absolutely winning right now. There is a lifetime of free diverse content just a click away.

Theoretically the consumer should be winning. But the glut of content (TV shows, new bands) and the supplementary marketing for that content (blog posts, tweets, IG, newspaper articles) makes it very difficult to actually locate the content itself.

"One click away" suggests that I should be able to acquire it at any store. But that is not true either. Some things are exclusive to a streaming network or store (Apple Music/Amazon).

There's a discoverability problem here, as well as friction when it comes to acquiring the product itself.

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