Brooding with Butch #1 “Content”
“If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
- I don’t know, some boring capitalist dude. This is real quote, I just don’t want to attribute it because we make our own rules in the writers roost.
Hello everyone! I totally forgot to send out a newsletter yesterday! Since I’m quite busy today, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to release my first in a special series of installments called Brooding with Butch. I figured that entries in this particular series will be exploring things about being a creative writer that make me mad. For our first installment in BWB, we’ll talk about one of the main things that makes me feel all sorts of anger. That is the unholy relationship between the artist and hustle culture.
The decision to independently publish my Mariana the Moon Girl series was an experiment I decided to try after the early uncertainty of the COVID pandemic made me think it might be worth exploring. I’d always intended on traditionally publishing and had spent the year before the pandemic reaching out to editors and agents about Mariana book one. I don’t know if y’all remember March 2020, but it felt good to take a little control during a very uncertain situation to do this. While the decision to go independent and do it myself isn’t something I regret, it has laid bare some realities about being independent that I’m not a huge fan of.
Namely, that we are all expected to be expert marketers nowadays. I’ve tried experiments with facebook, instagram, and amazon ads, getting onto BookTok, done research on blog blasts, even looked into hiring a social media marketer. For anyone that creates anything these days, there’s this overwhelming expectation of creating content. This has even seeped into my day job in recruiting, where I have seen more success as an indie recruiter when I’m posting content on LinkedIn, versus when I’m not. Think about that. I’m posting hiring content on LinkedIn to be more successful at my job. And while I only post things that I’m passionate about, it still bums me out hardcore that the largest and most successful social network I have is on LinkedIn. Oof.
I’ve honestly started to even just hate the word “content.” You need to be making content! How can you expect to sell any books if you aren’t putting content out there? What kind of content are you creating to get your work out there? You cannot be content with your current collection of content!
This, plus the expectation that everyone needs to have multiple streams of income just to make ends meet nowadays, and that hustlers especially need to have passive income streams, is just so boring. I hate hustle culture. Can’t we do anything just for the love of it? Why do I have to turn my writing into a hustle? If I could afford to do it, I’d release my books for free. But I want to build a life where I can spend more time on my writing than on anything else, and it’s difficult trying to figure out how to do that.
Confession, I once seriously considered and even began researching what it’d be like to sell erotica books online. I’ve heard of multiple indie authors who make ends meet by coming up with very low effort fantasy erotica (a la Twilight, but with actual sex), churning out a book a week, and making good money doing it. This is an accepted method of being a successful indie author! I even outlined a few ideas and came up with a penname, but in the end I just couldn’t do it. On the one hand, I knew I was too much of a perfectionist that it’d kill me putting something sloppy out there (even if it was supposed to be sloppy!). Plus, even with a penname I was worried about someone making a connection between a random erotica author and the guy trying to write really sincere young adult novels.
But hey, did you know there are finance bros out there who recommend publishing books as a great passive income stream? I mean, I’m sure they’re right when you’re talking about the following that they’ve built, writing books called “Making Sense of Sales: the Things I Learned about Selling by Scraping Elon’s Tweets for a Coherent Throughline” but it also makes me die a little thinking about my books as passive income streams.
There are people out there doing it though! They’re out there making a living doing exactly what I’d love to do, because they’re far more willing than I am to feel like a shill putting marketing out there that people really don’t mind. But here’s the important part: I’m the one in the wrong here. I do a disservice to my writing for feeling like a fraud every time I encourage people to buy my books. It is dumb of me that I don’t work harder at this. If there is a reason why I never am able to do this full time, it will likely be because of this.
Be better than me at content creation if you’re thinking of going indie. Understand that you need to occasionally turn your artist brain off and turn on your business brain. I’m incredibly happy with the success I have had in publishing independently. I’ve sold way more copies of my books than I honestly thought I would with the network that I have. But my sales have faltered and that has been a result from my marketing efforts faltering too.
Below is a picture of my cat, Butch. I hope you enjoyed our first entry into Brooding with Butch.
-Jacob
P.S. Is it weird that part of me is convinced I could have written some pretty stellar erotica? It was going to be scifi erotica too, so stellar could be both literal and figurative in this case.