selling out: branding for poets
A few weeks back I bookmarked this Vox article with the aim of reading it through more thoroughly. Revisiting it today, it got me thinking about this weird dual state most writers or artists find themselves in. It may be a modern age thing, since many of the artists we know from the distant past, particularly literary ones, had other people doing the heavy lifting of issuing, promoting, and curating the work. While the artists could simply hide in a garret all day and then turn up at a bar or cafe occasionally for appearances or readings (or getting in fights with other writers.)
This is, of course, not the lit world that baby poet me was born into in the 90s and early aughts. Even the machines that put work out into the world, like journals and small presses, relied much on the author's own promo, platforms, and appearances to sell work. Maybe if you landed a Big Five publisher or were financially stable enough to enroll a professional PR person, you could sit back and solely focus on the work itself, but that was not even an option. Especially for writers who not only had to split their time between writing and promoting but also whatever else they were doing to actually make a living--teaching, freelance, or other day jobs. Many writers like to talk about the good ole days when you could just bow out of the process mostly once you're genius had been manifested and move on to the next project, but I don't think that was true for most authors, no matter your genre, and hadn't been so in a while.
I took to finding ways to promote work early when I actually didn't have that much work, and maybe that's why, now, two decades in, it feels much less arduous. It takes time, of course, time you could probably be writing. But since I find all sorts of ways to waste time (streaming bad TV shows, scrolling reels, watching thrifting hauls on YouTube) and not writing, I suppose it could be a far worse way to spend my time. In 2001, I made my first author website, along with my first curation project, wicked alice. I had just begun publishing frequently in similar online journals and wanted to start my own. I used a free website generator that had ads for at least another two years before I bought a proper domain. In 2001, even MySpace was in its fledgling days, though later I did have one of those briefly. What we know of social media was still years off for most of us.
That early website was mostly just a way to corral an internet presence into one place as more and more poems wound in more and more journals. It provided a place to direct people to, a landing spot if readers were interested in reading more. I didn't start blogging until late 2003, on Xanga, which was much more community-feeling, sort of like an early mix of Live Journal and what Tumblr would eventually be. Between 2003 and 2007 or so, I like to think of as the golden era of poetry blogs. I hopped to this space in early 2005 and have been here since. On those blogs, many people stuck to craft discussions and reviews and strictly writing-related topics. But this space has always felt like partly that, but also part diary or journal, part sounding things out or thinking out loud. It was also part of a general conversation with other writers before short-form social media became the norm around 2009-ish.
Those same authors would later move to things like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter. I used Tumblr as my domain forwarded homepage for a while in the 2010s, and I liked the shareability of it, but left when new no-porn guidelines kept getting collages with even slight nudity blocked by bots. I moved that homepage to another Blogger account since I needed a slightly different set-up than what I have here. It's not a site that gets a lot of traffic, even as much as this blog, since most of my direction to things comes via social media, but it's a nice landing spot to get to everything else to include in bios and business cards and such. From there, you can get to the shop, my YouTube video poems, my portfolio on Flickr that I use for art, and Instagram (where I post most of my content these days). I still spend a good amount of time on Facebook, but it's more for keeping up with friends and family and occasional randomness. I do put links to books and share things to keep folks apprised of what I'm up to, along with other freelance writing bits, but promotion is not its main purpose. It's also behind a friend wall to keep out trolls and mansplainers.
Instagram is where you will most often find me doing promotion-like things on the public side of the internet, though much can be said to approaching even that platform a little differently the past couple of years. More as a way to share work and creative "content" and not just purely as a promo or "branding" (whatever that is or means to you) vehicle. It's maybe more the aims of what I post there vs. what I actually post there. Instead of just directing people to publications and book sales pages, I try to create more meaty things that can be enjoyed wholly via the medium like reels and video poems and poem postcards. While I veered away from TikTok after a month of trying it out last April for NaPoWriMos (it felt a little too wild west and random for continued use, but maybe I will return this April for that. ) I do like video as a potential delivery for words, be that text-driven pieces or audio readings. I actually get a great amount of joy creating the things themselves, which while not scratching the same itch as actual writing or artwork, still is enjoyable in the same way graphic design is or building a website.
As for the "brand, " I'm not sure. It's a gross word when it seems wrapped up in commerce, but it's probably more innocuous when you view it not as limiting and cutting off parts of yourself but as a way to exist on the internet as a creator in an authentic way. I get that those two things may seem completely incongruous, but I don't think they have to be. I don't believe there is anything to selling out unless you find yourself doing things you don't want to do or for all the wrong reasons. I also think not all platforms are right for all writers. I hated Twitter mostly, so it was easy to walk away amid its downfall, but I do like creating for Instagram and YouTube a lot, so the importance is finding one you like and figuring out how to enjoy it. Many writers prefer not to have an internet presence at all. I think you should have something, even if it's just a link to a public portfolio in Google Docs that tells people where to find you.
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