For Love or Money

Unqualified advice from a ruminating rube, free of charge and worth every penny

Someone asked me for advice recently.

"I love writing. How do I build an audience and make money from it?"

My response had three parts. As everything should.

➡️ First, go on vacation. Before you leave on vacation, schedule your next one. This wasn’t relevant to the question. But it's part of my standard advice package. And it provides a third part so there are three parts. As there should be.

➡️ Second, ask someone better qualified. If I had the answer, I'd have bought my own publishing house by now, which I'd use to bring thoughtful and excellent work to the world. Which might, but probably wouldn't, arrest the unfolding enshittification of how we think and communicate.

➡️ Third, change your goal. The best writing is not built for revenue, though it occasionally ends up creating it. The more pure an act of expression, the less it cares who approves.

The fastest way to kill your voice is to obsess about selling it. Write authentically. Before you have all the answers. Be imperfect. Messy. Ignore edicts of format. Treat "algorithm" as an epithet.

Sometimes, people will be influenced by or even like what you write. Sometimes they won't.

If they always like, your creative process is not pure enough. Pure expression is not palatable to 100 percent of readers.

If they never like, you might be choosing the wrong adventure. If you're a fish, tree climbing is a dubious vocational choice.

As soon as I present this duality as useful guidance for assessing your own work, it starts to decompose. Because the layered complexity of human reasoning includes the capacity to alter behavior based on new information. You might start asking the “after” questions before. Like whether something you’re writing will be universally magnetic or totally repellent. Then you’ll be tempted to change what you’re writing based on the answer.

This distorts the creative process. It kills purity. In the immortal words of Admiral Akbar, it’s a trap.

The key is that you like. You know there is value in your words and thoughts. You hope others agree, but that's not why you're writing. You're creating for it's own sake, and releasing into the world the words and ideas you find resonant. Not to get validated. But also not to proactively alienate. Just for the sake of releasing them.

Think of yourself as releasing animals from captivity into the wild. They’re not going to thank you. They’re not going to hang around and attack you either. They’re just going to be what they are.

When you get reinforced by others, it'll inspire you to keep going. We all need that. I certainly do.

Some of us have a soft spot for a certain editor or reviewer at large. If they like what we write, it makes our day. If they don’t like what we write, we go into self-loathing mode.

Getting out of that mode requires a duel with that old adversary, insecurity. That bane of criminal mischief who lives in our heads, and who hassles us more often when we frequent that space. The more he entangles us, the more front we erect to hide the truth. So he doesn’t become bold by the knowledge he’s onto something.

But we know his tactics. Eventually we squint enough to peer through his distortions. In a climactic melee, we wrestle him down, making our getaway while he’s stumbling back to his feet. Freed from the confining bounds of the skull, we create again, promising not to get bogged down there again.

But much as we covet the warmth of approval and abhor the pang of crafting thud-worthy work loved only by its creator, we can’t let reinforcement become a drug.

Writing with approval as the goal is a cul-de-sac. You'll either fail outright because your writing will suck, or you'll pander, and thus build something not worth possessing. This is how superb creators end up whores to the cat video meme industry. Click-farming pays the bills until it doesn’t. Before that point, the soul perishes.

Realizing you've built a kingdom of shite so can be a spirit breaker for good writers who get sidetracked by the pesky chore of paying for food and heat.

I built a blog back in '13-'15. It started out pure. "Beautiful" would be a stretch. But it was pretty. Like a slobbery, pug-faced bulldog is pretty.

Then, for reasonable reasons, I sold the rights to a social media start-up in exchange for some monthly scratch and a load of shares that would have to double in value to be worthless.

The company proceeded to drain the life out of my creation. They bled it dry, sold its organs, ground its bones into meal, and kept the carcass as a puppet, which they still animate with shock paddles to gather hollow clicks.

It was an honest mistake. But it was a mistake.

If I make it again, it's no longer an honest mistake but a knowing foible. And if you make it after I've warned you to the contrary, we become co-captains of the Good Ship Moron.

If your goal is to make money from writing, you probably won't.

If your goal is to produce your best work and let the chips fall where they may, you stand a better chance of those chips falling in your favor.

Even that better chance isn’t much of a chance. So don’t write for money. Write because you love it. If you love it, there’s a chance someone else will, and that’ll be nice too. But your love must stand on its own. Not conditioned on what anyone else thinks.

That is writing. Everything else is something less.

So my advice is to build your writing project alongside material reserves. Enough that you don't need to profit from writing.

Now go enjoy that vacation. And the next one. Have a mimosa. Have two.

Because “tick tock” isn't just the moniker for a social media vector delivering digital brainworms. It recites the perpetual state of life and the world we're lucky to inhabit for a mere flicker.

Tony is a writer. He lives in Manchester.