How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia

I will be the first to admit that this is not a scholarly text.

Do you ever find yourself saying, “I understand this is how it works, but it’s so dumb”?

I have a secret.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to kill myself.

I was hanging out at the LA Festival of Books with my friend, who wrote a choose-your-own-adventure book called You Are a Filmmaker.

It’s hard to show writers how to grow their author business without talking about capitalism because the biggest thing holding writers back are the constraints of capitalism.

I have been chronically ill for 20 years.

I have been listening to Kesha’s music since she was making trashy club songs , and I was a trash panda getting wasted in bars every weekend.

When I first started building my career in earnest, Gary Vee was using the term “attention arbitrage” to explain what people needed to be concerned with in the then-nascent creator economy.

Even though it’s critical to a business’s success, most people hate the idea of selling their products.

I think about whisks a lot.

I find it hard to develop a shared language about how difficult it is to create and launch creative projects.

I write weird books.

There is a very powerful sword belonging to a very powerful house in a very powerful Franchise That Shall Not Be Named that “only takes in that which makes it stronger”.

People often ask me how I get over bad reviews and keep going even when people are unimaginably cruel.

There is a darkness that comes with growth.

As a person who specializes in author growth, especially the type of free or cheap viral growth that doesn’t cost a lot of money, I have a confession to make.

I always thought that the more successful you became in business, the more rational, logical, and measured you would be, but I’ve had a different journey. I started in business very “business-minded”.

I made $50,000 more in 2023 than any other year in my whole career before then, and I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to keep it all together.

I’m a natural Tundra.

People talking about the massive disruption happening in media right now are missing an important bit that we ignore at our peril,

A few months ago, somebody asked why, given the negative reactions some people have, we should help anyway.

I read a lot of tech articles, specifically about growth and scale, two words that are as exhausting as they are enthralling.

It’s over!