https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/peasant-woodland
"In
Coming home, I wrote about my adaptation of the POSSE model (“publish on
your site, syndicate elsewhere”). Alan Jacobs responds with a thoughtful
counter-proposal: “POS, not POSSE. Skip the syndication.”
Fair enough. In fact, POS is the strategy I employed for the better part of two
years, when I (quietly) left Twitter but continued to blog and send the
occasional newsletter. The decision to return to some kind of presence on the
platforms—and ultimately the syndication that I’m using now—was not taken
lightly. But this opens up an interesting line of questions: why do we look for
readers? And where do we find them?
The first question has a variety of answers. I’m going to set aside, for the
moment, the fact that some of us apparently want readers because we see them as
a resource to be mined, following the now cliché startup wisdom that if you
have an audience, you can figure out how to monetize it. The more compelling
and interesting reason that most writers seek out readers is, I think, less
utilitarian: we receive our writing as a gift, and so it must be given in turn.
We write because something needs to be expressed through us, and only by giving
the writing to a reader is that need fulfilled. Here, I’m following Lewis Hyde
who writes that
the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along
remains abundant.
— Hyde, The Gift, page 26
That’s the why. The next question is trickier. Over the years, there have been
various ways to share your writing and for readers to find it—listserves,
blogrolls, webrings, Google Reader (RIP)—as well as a good old fashioned email
or even hitting up your friends on AIM or IRC. But as the platforms got bigger
and sucked us all up into their network effects, most of those other methods
have atrophied. Now if you want to find your readers, there aren’t many options
beyond the Nazi platforms, or the cool kids platform, or the desperate workers
platform, or the anarchist anti-platform. I first developed a readership on
Twitter; later, when I knew my days on Twitter were numbered, I made an effort
to move those readers over to a newsletter list. I have no idea how I’d start
from scratch today."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/274-beautiful-confusion-billion-years/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
