What Am I Doing Here?

The blessing and curse of being a writer in the 21st century is that there are endless places to publish things. Whereas in the 20th century you needed to petition the few businesses which owned the kinds of presses that could make a few hundred thousand copies of a paperback to get your writing in stores, today everyone has a printing press in their pocket. This has been catastrophic for the ability to get paid for writing, but rather nice for the ability to get paid for a comic strip. There are so many options, each with advantages and disadvantages, that Jane Friedman felt it necessary to write an essay on the major paths to book publishing.

The advantages of blogging are that it is immediate, has no gatekeepers, and is available to the whole Internet. The disadvantages are that it has never paid (except for a few years in the oughties, and some of the blogs branded as ‘newsletters’ today) and never got public acknowledgement and respect. Old Media journalists boost other journalists, twitter people boosted other twitter people, self-published novelists boost other self-published novelists, but bloggers never set up that kind of mutual appreciation society. As a purely Internet format, it is also both terribly fragile and easy for people of ill will to dig through with a muck rake; don’t forget that Google forgets a lot and almost all the alternatives are powered by Microsoft Bing. And writing for the whole Internet can be really scary, but its hard to understand an audience which is not in person. Peter Gainsford had some comments back in 2017:

Sometimes these theories go unrefuted by their peers, in spite of or maybe because of their idiosyncrasies. In these cases, I won’t be doing any kind of debunking. This is partly out of professional respect, but mainly because of the limitations of blogs. Even if I am dead sure that these theories are untrue, this isn’t the right place to do so — unless I’m just supporting an existing published refutation. The right place is in the pages of an academic journal. The catch is that writing an academic article is generally a tad harder than debunking myths in a blog, even if some blog posts involve nearly as much work and research.

‘Kiwi Hellenist’ blog 29 March 2017 https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/03/off-limits-these-theories-arent-for.html

Programmer Dan Luu is more optimistic (or less a part of academic culture):

There’s nothing magic about academic papers. I have my name on a few publications, including one that won best paper award at the top conference in its field. My median blog post is more rigorous than my median paper or, for that matter, the median paper that I read.

When I write a paper, I have to deal with co-authors who push for putting in false or misleading material that makes the paper look good and my ability to push back against this has been fairly limited. On my blog, I don’t have to deal with that and I can write up results that are accurate (to the best of my abillity) even if it makes the result look less interesting or less likely to win an award.

https://danluu.com/overwatch-gender/

My long-form web projects like Armour in Texts or Reenacting the Long Sixth Century don’t seem to be as useful for other people as I expected they would be. (Thanks to everyone who has told me in person or by email they they find them useful!) Many people who would benefit from reading them access the Internet through Facebook, and spending hours every week promoting them on Facebook really does not seem like a good idea. Even before corporate social media started hiding posts with links offsite, it was hard to get people to click links away from a mailing list or forum (and if I post the whole thing on Facebook, its hard for people on Facebook to find). So just because anyone can read them for free does not mean that the people who most need them will read them for free. Some people value things more if they have to work or pay to access them.

Here are types of things which it makes sense for me to post about on my websites:

• Little bits of writing to write or read in between other tasks. This seems like the natural form for a professional writer’s blog, although some of the newsletter type blogs make money from long essays. If it might be of interest to someone, but can’t easily be sold or added to the scholarly record, why not post it?
• Collections of sources, research, or links on a topic. These provide a backup memory bank to my thirty-something wetware, but they obviously have to be topics I am willing to share publicly.
• Working through my thoughts in writing. If figuring out what I think about something is important to me, it does not matter that few others are interested!
• Book reviews. On my own site, I don’t have to follow the expectations of the publishing industry that I review books shortly before or after they come out to maximize sales. I can review a book from 20 years ago that deserves attention or was worth thinking about.
• Sometimes I have posted ‘post-publication peer review’ of research I disagree with although that takes a lot of time and effort and I’m not sure of the audience
• Pretty old things. I found more of these when I was travelling outside the Salish Sea area!
• Analysis of the systems that govern the Internet and social media. I feel kind of dirty when I do so because the Internet and social media are full of people telling you that the Internet and social media are really important and necessary, and this can get in the way of finding ways to connect with people or make money offline. But some people don’t seem to know the things I know!

Those long-form projects were useful to me as ‘collections of sources’ and ‘working through my thoughts’ even if they did not find the few hundred active users I was hoping for.

I could tell more stories about myself and the people I have met. I feel like people don’t want to hear my stories face to face. I am also burned out by the time early in the COVID era when I read too many self-identified intellectuals who overshare on social media. I think there is a positive feedback loop where people who feel successful and admired have more energy to put things into the world.

These days some people launch web projects with a bigger investment of time, whether long-form essays or a newsletter with hand-drawn illustrations, and hope that it gets a big audience. That does not make sense for me given that I already give the Internet a lot of my time and energy. Since I started this blog in 2013, services like Patreon, Substack, and Ghost let many more people make money from long-form serial projects online, but most projects like that never get much traction (and writing for the Internet is not a good way to advance human knowledge or create something which will outlive you). People who get a big audience and make a lot of money on Substack tend to be concentrated in specific cities and subcultures such as Old Media journalism and the rationalist movement, I don’t live in one of those cities and those cultures are not my culture (Dan Luu above has a large minimum pledge for his Patreon because his audience is high-income software developers who can throw $24/month at something that amuses them). Around 2028 I should have time in my writing queue to try something long with big broad claims or exciting language like a history of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece or a novel.

These days there are lots of podcasts on the ancient world and military history such as Thin End of the Wedge. Creating a podcast takes a big investment of time and energy and I don’t have a melodious voice or the ability to sound relatable to large audiences. I have appeared on some podcasts and that lets me use my strengths (talking enthusiastically about areas of expertise) but not my weaknesses (finding and keeping large audiences).

I publish about two scholarly articles and present two or three conference papers a year (although the conferences have slowed down in 2024 while I look for better work). Those build my reputation and relationships in the academic world and the academic publications will be around long after the Internet, but they don’t pay cash (instead, they pay in job opportunities and the fulfillment of job requirements, but hiring in ancient world studies has collapsed). It can also easily take two years from sending in the text to receiving the official published version (once I waited five years!)

I am looking for more paper and web magazines to publish short nonfiction for the public. So far I have published with five or six different magazines, but I am looking for more so that if one is not the right place or falls behind on payments I can try another. That also puts my name and expertise in front of more people. The disadvantage is that I need to go through the process of pitching a topic, sending in a draft, being edited, and issuing an invoice. That devours time and energy. I think I could get something published as ‘science writing’ for many dimes per word if I framed it right, if any of my contacts has suggestions of where and how please let me know!

I may try a guest post on one of the big blogs on ancient world studies.

One person found me through YouTube. Going on someone else’s YouTube channel might be a good idea for making myself findable there, although I was always reluctant to post closeups of my face on the Internet because I knew facial recognition software and deepfakes were coming. Until I have more writing for sale, such as my second book, the benefit of being better known is not clear to me. It seems like many people I meet with similar interests know my writing but I am still working to make a little money from it. The Internet has made the career of an Adrian Goldsworthy or David Nicolle hard to repeat, although if you want to write about big ideas you can be a David Graeber or Yuval Noah Harari.

I write because I have to, but if you can, please support this site

Further Reading: Steve Muhlberger, “The Future of Academic Publishing,” Muhlberger’s World History (2008) https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2008/07/future-of-academic-publication.htm

Andrew Gelman meta-blogs here https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/17/bill-james-hangs-up-his-hat/

Matt Reed looks back on his nineteen-year career as a blogger and columnist:

A lot has changed since “Confessions” started (on Blogspot in 2004). Back then blogs were considered vaguely disreputable. Slowly they became mainstream and eventually almost quaint. (I always thought of mine as a column by another name, so that didn’t bother me much.)

“Stepping Away,” Confessions of a Community College Dean, 31 July 2023 https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/2023/07/31/time-reset

Other students of the ancient world with blogs are Rebecca F. Kennedy, Kiwihellenist (Peter Gainsford), Spencer McDaniel, Neville Morley, Brent Nongbri, Joshua P. Nudell, Powered by Osteons (Kristina Killgrove), and Liv Yarrow.

(scheduled 8 June 2024)

Edit 2024-07-14: added Dan Luu quote and reference

Edit 2024-07-18: added Gelman post

Edit 2024-07-27: added Reed post

Edit 2024-10-25: I like this quote from Dan Davies

the reason I kept coming back after doing the first one (publishing the first book) is that you just meet really interesting people. Very few people in this life get rich from writing books, and certainly compared to consulting on financial regulation, which is my day job, it is not as lucrative – but you meet a lot more interesting people in the publishing world, and people just get in touch with you, they get in touch with you on Twitter or drop you an email and say, “Oh, I really like this book,” and you go, “I’ll meet up for a coffee next time we’re in London.” … I came into this from the world of sell-side research, where I was used to the idea that I was writing things every week that would go to no more than 200 people – I’ve never had that idea that you need to be reaching tens of thousands of people to be doing anything valid.

“Balancing control and chaos, with Dan Davies,” Complex Systems podcast, 22 August 2024 https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-organizations-fraud/