Unabashed

Kevin Kelly is a long-time internet mainstay, one of the original founders of Wired Magazine, and a week or so ago he posted this bit concerning his “1000 True Fans” theory (P.S.–if you haven’t read The Technium, I highly recommend it):

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

This based on the presumption that the creator in question can produce quality material over a long period of time, and that the True Fan will shell out around $100 a year for those creative works. Voilà: $100,000 per year makes for a decent living. It sounds good, yes; but I’m not so sure this model will work for writers the way it can for creators in other mediums. At least not unless the person doing the writing is already notable for something other than writing. Reason being: In every other medium creators’ works can have an immediate impact on a potential fan (call it the Wham! factor). Whether it’s a song, a painting, a photograph, or even a shirt–when it’s good, and you like it, you’ll know it almost immediately. You might not know why, other than Wham!–you just love it as soon as you lay eyes on it, or listen to the first ten seconds of the opening riff. But with a writer it doesn’t work that way.

Musicians can build a fan base using this principle and do very well for themselves. Rappers do it every day. I think even artists, who can paint their pictures and sell them at trade fairs and such can use this theory. But for writers I don’t think it will work. I’m jealous sometimes of musicians and the power their music can hold over an audience. I can listen to a song from the ’80s (when I was a teenager) now and all at once the power of the music can pull me back in time almost, remind me of sensations and feelings that I hadn’t even thought of since I’d last heard that song. That’s an awesome power to wield, and, as I say, I’m a little jealous of those who wield it. If I’m curled up reading a good book or even a short story, I can fall in love with the characters and I can connect with the story at different levels, but fiction can’t own you like music can. It can’t reel you in and make you its slave. (Or maybe it does for others; maybe it’s just me who can’t connect to it on that level.)

It might take a hundred pages of a novel before someone finds out if they like it or not. I recently picked up a copy of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and, after the first page, utterly hated it. I pressed on though, and found the rest of the book fantastic. But if I’d based my opinion of China as a writer on the first page or two of his book, which took me maybe ten minutes to read, I’d never have read another story by him (the passage in question can be read here. Just start at the beginning and read down about eight or ten paragraphs. To me, this is an awful way to start a book, with the first three or four paragraphs dedicated to the (boring) arc of a basket flying through the air. But the rest of the book is grand). Most books that I like I’ll know within the first chapter or two, but rarely earlier, because in a book the writer must establish things: character, setting, all those good bits that add depth to the story, that pull the reader in.

So what about short stories? Sure, shorts are great, but very few writers are going to cultivate a fan base using shorts alone. Let’s face it: short stories are primarily the entry-level gig most writers hire on for just to get their foot in the door of the big company. Writers want to write books; they don’t generally tend to set out wanting to write their fantastic stories in 3,000 words or less. They want the story to tell itself, and most stories–in my experience–want to be in excess of 25k words. They’re stubborn that way. And a reader has to invest something to know whether they’ll like it or not. That’s not the case with most other creative mediums in which someone can hear a song in passing (Wham!) and immediately fall in love with it. Movies…maybe. But movies still require no effort. They may take a little more investment of time than other mediums, but there’s still no effort required. You just stare blankly and determine if you want to stare blankly some more. With reading, people must invest time and effort.

So how does a writer overcome this obstacle? Well, blogging for one. I know I just posted an article about blog fiction, commenting that I don’t believe people want to read fiction on blogs, but I’m not talking about posting fiction. I’m talking about building an audience with your writing using slice-of-life vignettes, informational stubs, a few essays and some news. Developing that audience with as near to Wham! factor as a writer can produce, and then, once you’re published somewhere, hoping they’ll cross over from your blog to your fiction. It goes back to what I said earlier in this article–being notable for something else first. John Scalzi has a great article about creating a blogging niche:

I think it’s far less useful to put your fiction online than it is to spend some time creating an interesting blog and cultivating an audience for it. This is not an “either/or” situation, of course, as I have done both. But I will say that one of these you should do first, and that’s to work on your blog. 

It would be great if writers could use this “1000 True Fans” concept, go to Fundable and score a few thousand dollars for their next opus, but the medium is just too demanding of its fans for that–at least initially, until they’ve built their fan base beforehand. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d actually like to think that I am.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: artist, blog, creator, fan, fan base, Fiction, journal, writing