How to Get Noticed without Participating in Algorithmic Exploitation

To reiterate the problem: in a flooded media market, how do you get noticed?

Let’s sharpen the problem further. You’re not just competing in your own medium—say, the novel. You’re also competing with everything else that compels attention. Devoted novel readers are not immune to the lure of net surfing. Music fans are not immune to the lure of podcasts. Nobody, evidently, can resist the lure of Netflix binges. (Actually, I can. Just don’t subscribe. It’s that easy!)

You also live at probably the peak human population in world history, a trend that will reverse in a few decades. But that means no one has ever been statistically as inconsequential a human as you are at that moment. Nothing personal, of course.

On the other hand…

Being a tiny drop in the sea of creators also means that you have access to an ocean of consumers. Max human population also means max number of people who might be interested in your work.

Moreover, we live at a time of peak wealth. There’s a lot of dismay at how economic growth trends are reversing—I myself share the concern about how aspects of the web economy divert funds from the masses toward tiny meta-organizations that control information flow—but still, in the whole history of humanity, we are doing *great.* People are emerging from poverty every day at astonishing rates. Tons of people are gaining literacy and an appetite for more than mere survival.

At some point, basic survival needs are adequately met. It’s really not that much. We aren’t far as a planet from reaching that point.

You know what never runs out? The soul’s need to grow, strengthen, and flourish. It is impossible to max out the demand for beauty, mentorship, and wisdom.

People can be distracted from these, their real needs, with cheap entertainment and manufactured outrage. Many will be; they’ll willingly opt in. The soul can always refuse to grow; the hero can refuse to depart on the journey. That temptation will never leave any of us.

And yet: that means an everlasting call for the true heroes to call to those who are heading astray, to guide the newcomers onto the right path, and to foster and develop those who continue on it.

It’s good to let people know that beauty, mentorship, and wisdom is out there waiting for them—in that sense, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with marketing. It’s connecting creators with those who need and desire their creations.

What’s wrong is when marketing is an inherently self-refuting, self-destroying proposition, just like business itself does the same. If you profit off destruction, sooner or later you are headed toward destruction, too. If you market by manipulation, you are undermining the very souls that you’re trying to benefit.

There needs to be some consonance between, on the one hand, your outreach and sales strategies, and, on the other hand, the kinds of people you want to be out there in the world buying your work and selling their own. Self-interest alone should be enough to make the case, but few people are truly motivated by self-interest alone. The problem is more one of not seeing how to pursue an alternative path and then having the patience to see it through.

This is all very philosophical, but it’s been provoked by eavesdropping on conversations within the indie community about the challenge of marketing and getting your work recognized. As I’ve already demonstrated, it turns out algorithmic ads were a bad bargain. They were destined to betray authors in the end. The worm is beginning to turn already.

Yet even here, the deeper wisdom about successful marketing of creative endeavors keeps poking through. Here’s what every creative ought to know about marketing:

1) Build a website. Your own website, in which you own the intellectual property. Then you aren’t serving up anyone else’s ads, and you can’t be booted off your own land. Anyone in the world can reach you instantly this way.

2) Set up an email list. Give generously to those who freely render their email addresses to you. Ask for them to buy something often enough for them to remember that you are a business and need money to stay afloat, but not so often that they feel pressured or exploited. Related to this: never buy anyone else’s list. It pisses people off, and they were never your true fans anyway.

3) Make personal connections. Start with the people you actually know. Email, call, text, chat, and let them know what you’re making. Don’t be weird about it. If they’re actually interested, they’ll follow up. But probably your truest fans will not be people you already know. You’ll be surprised at who they turn out to be. If they’re brave enough to email you or speak to you at an event, treat them like the human beings they are. You don’t need to give up all your time to cultivate a potential customer who demands time but won’t make a return in terms of a sale. But it’s really amazing what kind of connections you can build up around a creative business.

4) Do your outreach through adjacent creators. If you’re a writer, find the magazines and journals that are constantly hungry for material and let them publish something from one of your books. If you’re a poet, find the open mike nights. If you’re a guru, attend the conferences that you want to speak at someday. And so on. Random outreach, along the lines of old-school ad placement, is just not a good option when you’re a small-scale creator. But participating in the targeted advertising of the exploitative algorithms is going to betray you sooner rather than later. Marketing that comes out of the hard work of making connections will always pay off better.

5) Be patient. Einstein supposedly observed that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. It applies not only to money but also to time. There’s no substitute for patience and perseverance. Which is another reason you actually have to love the work—otherwise, what’s the point of sticking to it?

One thing worth noticing is that none of these strategies are something you can really pay someone else to do. Sure, you can have a service or a coder set up your website and your email list. But you’re the one who has to generate the content. You have to make the connections, personal and institutional. You’re the one who has to wait.

Is that so terrible, though? If you’re a creator who really cares about your creations, then you ultimately want your consumers to value what you’ve created and engage with it deeply. It’s a mutual investment strategy: you invest in them and they invest in you.

That is, I imagine, the logic behind Kevin Kelly’s famous “1000 true fans” dictum. Whether or not the math really works on that is questionable—it’s hard to charge $100 a year for your writing, for example, if you’re a poet or a novelist, much less find 1000 people who are willing to part with that much each and every year just for you. But on balance it’s much more likely to work if you invest on this personal scale than if you rely on Facebook ads to scrounge up fans for you.

The other condition for this strategy working is for consumers to resist the algorithmic direction of their interests and therefore their money toward its own winner-take-all choices. Small-scale creatives have to train people to see the problem and resist it.