| Hey, I don't always love how it works, but the YouTube algorithm can serve up a diamond now and then. I think you'll love it too because anyone with an interest in making art, cultivating a following online, and building a sustainable career as a creative person should enjoy Jack Conte's recent talk at SXSW. As I mentioned before, Jack Conte has a unique perspective as an artist and creator, one who built a cult following online as a musician in the early days of digital, and who then founded Patreon so other artists could use the tools he had developed to build an audience. And if that wasn't enough, he has since been leading discussion on YouTube in the last few years about how the internet is changing for creatives who like paying bills and eating food. And changing in this specific way: the algorithms which focus so much on user engagement over any other consideration are putting the Subscribe button under threat - which was the big breakthrough for artists of this generation. It's a very entertaining talk with lots of smart things to say on the meta level, but lots of funny experiences to share from his life as a failing musician and the pain of going on a tour when nobody shows up; you'll definitely relate to his struggles and frustrations. I recommend watching the entire thing, if you haven't already - it's 42-minutes long, but it flies by because it's funny and clever and peppered with valuable insights. Okay, so, there's a lot there in his quite vivid picture of the landscape - which can be basically summarized as: 1. The Subscribe Button was a revolutionary piece of internet architecture which shifted the economic paradigm for artists, enabling us to bypass the gatekeepers. 2. Web 1.0 was basically a broadcast medium, a static internet. But in the early 2000s, web 2.0 arrived with social media and anyone could publish, interact, and follow. 3. Algorithms came next, with their relentless focus on user engagement. Social feeds began to fill with content from people other than those you were following - just stuff the algos thought you might like. 4. TikTok took those trends to the nth degree and "perfected" the slightly creepy but definitely addictive algo-driven feed where the subscribe/follow is little more than a datapoint, and it's outsized success meant that everyone else decided to become TikTok, at least a little bit. The conclusion: it's more essential than ever to build your own platform. You don't own the land on Facebook or Amazon and certainly not on TikTok. And while you might get some short-term wins, you will never win the algo game long-term. My own view I definitely agree with his framing of how the internet has developed over the last 30 years or so, how it became so important for artists… but then started to change. I'd only quibble about some of the proposed remedies in minor ways. I have a lot of thoughts on this which I'm just starting to unpack, but the main conclusion is a familiar one, but always worth underlining. Your end game should never be on land you don't control. You should always be seeking to move readers onto your platform - from all these other places - and make that the center of your efforts, where you will capture reader interest and deepen reader engagement. Patreon is one way of doing that, which Jack Conte is a big fan of, obviously, as he is the founder and basically a walking evangelist for the company, which he essentially built from the ground up to give other creatives the tools he developed to create an audience of superfans. I think Patreon is great, I think crowdfunding is great, I think any postive outreach and community building and platform building you can do with your readers is a huge positive - and indeed the key to a long-term, sustainable, and profitable career. As Jack Conte acknowledges himself towards the end of the speech, there are other ways to achieve those goals - and email most definitely is one of them. For me, it's the best tool for the job, but if you are the kind of person and the type of writer who is drawn to the idea of Patreon or Kickstarter or whatever else, then you should explore that urge. Lots of people make it work very well and get great satisfaction from that kind of connection with their readers. Remember the basic book marketing formula: product, platform, and promotion. The product is the book, duh, but also the packaging too - making sure you have a genre appropriate cover, your pricing is in line with the competition, your blurb is not just compelling but speaks to your target reader, and so on. The platform is your collective juice, your presence on the world wide web - social channels, website, mailing list. The promotion is the marketing you engage in to reach new readers - promo sites, discounts, free runs, Facebook Ads, and so on. You don't need to do everything - even huge bestsellers with a team of people can't do everything. You need a product, of course, but after that you have so many options with how you put the pieces together, and you can choose a path reflecting your own personal skills, experience, budget, and goals. Just make sure you are working on both your platform and promotion at the same time - and not neglecting one or the other, because you need both. If that means just focusing on Facebook Ads and email marketing... that's enough. More is better, naturally, but not at the cost of a loss of focus. It's better to be good at one ad platform than to know the mere basics of several. You have choices when it comes to your platform too. Some authors will be drawn to things like Patreon and crowdfunding. Others might work in niches where an SEO strategy is more appealing. A few might recognize the drawbacks of building their true platform on socials but are just so good with social media and growing so fast there, that the risk is worth it for them. Hey, everything's a trade-off. Regardless, you will find huge value in your email list - which can always seed those other things rather nicely too. Which is kinda the point here. No matter how you put the pieces together for your own writing career – and no matter how that changes over time in unforeseen ways – a strong list means you can pivot as needed and skip some growing pains. That's it for this week. Before I ride off into the sunrise, and while we are on the topic of AAA video content for glamorous and captivating artists, Episode 2 of the Image Workshop is in the can. I'm just waiting for the moody video editor (that's me) to recover from a minor medical procedure, which seems to involve eating his weight in grapes. That video should drop this week, so make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel - where you can also find Episode 1, as well a short preview/explainer in case you are wondering what the hell I am talking about! Looks like we hit 10,000 subscribers on the channel while I was convalescing. The Image Workshop seems to be popular so we are going to press ahead with regular episodes and lots of them. Subscribers remain super valuable on YouTube but, of course, it has been TikTokified too - the Subscribe button there now simply acts as a nudge to drop something into your feed. At least they still share most of the ad revenue with creators... Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Amadou & Mariam with Sabali. | 
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