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It happens everywhere in marketing, at all levels. Strippers, movie stars, ballet dancers. Anyone whose job it is to reach eyeballs and build a 'brand'. It is

by 23B1 2y ago

It happens everywhere in marketing, at all levels. Strippers, movie stars, ballet dancers. Anyone whose job it is to reach eyeballs and build a 'brand'. It is nigh on impossible to get a literary manager these days unless you have a sizable social media following, for example. It's absolute brain rot.

zztop44 2y ago
But that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour. It’s nigh impossible to sell literary prose at any significant volume unless you have a sizeable social media following. The only exceptions are people who have a sizeable traditional media following and a specific personal reason for not being on social media.
- 23B1 2y ago
  "that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour" feels hand-washy. chicken/egg of course, but the question people – especially technologists – should be asking is: is that really helping society progress? I would argue, like this article does, that it isn't and is indeed harming society by atomizing and attempting to quantify behavior in the name of 'choice' which of course is a non-sequitur. The commercial engines should be in service of humanity and enrichment, not the other way around. A brilliant writer isn't a social media maven, nor should they be.
InkCanon 2y ago
The main hack these commodification entities makes seems to be to disrupt the traditional flow of information and valuation, then create a new marketplace it controls. For books, I imagine many centuries ago the literary class wrote and read books largely from the social and intellectual forces at the time. The smallest unit of these interactions would be a member reading a book, liking it and recommending it to his friends. The net aggregation of such would slowly produce a trend, communicating to writers that there was a higher chance of being read if you followed it. Now such exchanges have been consumed by digital marketplaces. The sheer size means writers have to make a Faustian bargain to bend to it's needs, while readers have a curated list of books for them. Any well reading writer and reader have an impossible time communicating because the main flow of information has been hijacked.

by 23B1 2y ago

zztop44 2y ago

But that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour. It’s nigh impossible to sell literary prose at any significant volume unless you have a sizeable social media following. The only exceptions are people who have a sizeable traditional media following and a specific personal reason for not being on social media.

23B1 2y ago
"that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour" feels hand-washy. chicken/egg of course, but the question people – especially technologists – should be asking is: is that really helping society progress? I would argue, like this article does, that it isn't and is indeed harming society by atomizing and attempting to quantify behavior in the name of 'choice' which of course is a non-sequitur. The commercial engines should be in service of humanity and enrichment, not the other way around. A brilliant writer isn't a social media maven, nor should they be.

InkCanon 2y ago

The main hack these commodification entities makes seems to be to disrupt the traditional flow of information and valuation, then create a new marketplace it controls. For books, I imagine many centuries ago the literary class wrote and read books largely from the social and intellectual forces at the time. The smallest unit of these interactions would be a member reading a book, liking it and recommending it to his friends. The net aggregation of such would slowly produce a trend, communicating to writers that there was a higher chance of being read if you followed it. Now such exchanges have been consumed by digital marketplaces. The sheer size means writers have to make a Faustian bargain to bend to it's needs, while readers have a curated list of books for them. Any well reading writer and reader have an impossible time communicating because the main flow of information has been hijacked.