Fear of Commitment
My search for the perfect platform
My search for the perfect platform
Part 1: Blogging. My first love.
This is a multi-part series that will end when I no longer have anything to write about platforms: Blogging
When I took up blogging in 2004, I felt I had found a virtual oversized chair, the kind that is perfect for long bouts of reading and writing. I had been a lit major and started my career in print and was as much a ruminator as a writer. It made sense that I would start my career as an editorial assistant at a book publisher and later go into magazines. Entering the business of the written word, however, had killed the dream of writing for a living. I ended up working by day and writing by night. I had built a wall between my passion for writing and making money from it well before I built my first blog on TypePad.
I first interacted with blogs by reading them. My plan was to take on writing my blog like one takes up running, in shortish stints and building to a longer workout. To this day I still haven’t experienced a Runner’s High, but for me the rush I got from blogging was immediate, even if no one read my work. It was the act of putting my words out there for possible public consumption that was deeply satisfying. I didn’t need to wait for an editor to take my call, assign a concept completely different from my pitch, or approve my work. Removing that friction freed me to build my muscles and improve over time.
The Blogger’s High was so powerful that I did it alongside my job for a few months, then dropped the job — my only source of income at the time — to pursue it. Things will work themselves out, I thought, because for the first time I didn’t have to suffer to write.
Blogging also met another dormant desire to connect and receive immediate reactions to my work. My audience was never huge, but I connected with like-minded passionates in other parts of the world, and even some of my intellectual idols. It didn’t occur to me that the bulk of my time was being spent on a fringe activity still in its relative infancy, or that I was on the vanguard. I felt I was simply following a wave whose time had come.
While I came from the print world, I don’t think it enabled me any more than anyone else to embrace blogging early. If anything, many who were in the thick of print careers were most challenged with embracing blogging. Many made their living, after all, relying on the sanctity of their platform to tell a story better than anyone else. Many of my friends who were successful print authors were used to being paid a living wage for their work. Blogging initially muddied the waters and challenged our internal rate card. And new competencies were valued such as audience building, not just craft. I recall a friend, long a published author, lamenting how these unproven people were generating huge followings online. When I pressed her to use blogging to promote her print platform, she looked at me like I was naïve.
“I get paid for my work,” she said. “I’m not putting it out for public consumption for free.”
Similarly my book agent suggested to me that I write about “something other than what I’m known for by my blog readers” since it didn’t seem likely they’d pay to read what they’d already read about online.
Of course, years later, when my company ran a conference, sponsored by a major print publishing house seeking talent, it became clear that the public were more than willing to pay to read more from the bloggers they read every day.
This print elitism would dissolve into fierce catch-up by traditional writers and publishers alike to embrace this flowing economy of influence beneath their feet that was starting to slosh up to their ankles and knees. The water was still dirty, but welcome in the face of drying sales. Some emerging writers were keeping their business entirely online. One blogger, a pioneer in our industry, who made a name for herself as both a food blogger and SEO strategist, refused to dirty her hands with a traditional publisher, sharing that she could make more money from her own platform than from a publisher who would attempt to create buzz and profit alongside her already scaled platform (my words, not hers).
Blogging accomplished even more than I had hoped it would when I quit my job to pursue it. And there are residual effects from it. I believe that blogging was responsible for an overall improvement in our collective ability to write, design, and develop distribution strategies for our work. Interspersed among the SEO experts, virality doctors, and social media gurus, there’s a general population of online publishers that know how to create for a virtual audience, promote their work, and foster an online community.
And there were things that it did not do, that many feared it would. I recall being on a panel with my business partner, a social influence skeptic, and a New York Times reporter in Berkeley after only a year or so of running BlogHer. This was not an unusual mix back then, as this whole blogging thing was still considered a trend, or more, a trendy threat to traditional publishing. To me, the idea of uprooting traditional media, having run from it like a scorned acolyte, was both tantalizing and highly unrealistic. As any commercially successful blogger will tell — or show — you, crossing over onto more traditional platforms by publishing a book or — God willing — having a TV show is the ultimate sign of making it. The online page views are merely table stakes to stardom.
I stated my theory there that “the cream always rises” in this medium, much like it does anywhere else. Only the cream can rise faster and doesn’t need to rely on connections so much as an audience. Just as there are commercial — though, not critical — successes in traditional media, there would be also in social. And we, as bloggers, relied on the resources in more traditional media to help us. I wasn’t going to report on a war anytime soon. It was traditional media’s coverage of it that enabled me to provide commentary on it. We’d be symbiotic pieces of a now much-larger whole.
That was in 2006. And I was right: Civilization (traditional publishing) as we knew it would not crumble. But the media world would transform. And I, feeling kind of self-righteous about the whole many-to-many model, would still be learning a thing or two about social, as blogging was but a building block of what was to come.