It Is Exhausting To Always Be Hustling

"I respect the hustle, but why are you posting in so many places? I swear all I can see in my timeline is the stuff you're sharing."

This is a question I have been asked dozens of times over the years on nearly every social media platform I utilize. I've been messaged it on Facebook, Reddit, and once or twice I've even had people call me out on MeWe, and every time they start it with the same sentiment. They respect the amount of work I'm putting in, but why am I promoting my work in so many places?

I should think the answer is obvious, but just in case folks don't know, it's because I want people to see it, read/watch it, buy copies, and perhaps follow me to get more updates.

That's it. That's the whole reason. And let me tell you right now that it... is... exhausting that not only do creators have to be constantly on the grind like this, but that people will look at what we're doing and then deadass ask us why we're grinding so hard.

Because we have bills to pay, and not enough fans. We are poor. It's not that deep.

I don't know why this is so confusing to so many people.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

If I Didn't Have To Do This, I Wouldn't Be!

Again, to answer the obvious, the only reason creators post so much about their work is because we need to. No one, and I mean no one, is making self-promotion posts for the fun of it. For a majority of us, if we could just hole up in our studios and work on our projects, collect a check, and never have to engage with the public except for occasional interviews and cryptic forum posts once a year, that's what we would do.

While I can't give details for other creators, I can tell folks that I spend hours every day making promotional posts. Every day I go through Reddit, Facebook, MeWe, Bluesky, and I try to go through the comment section on YouTube, attempting to share, boost engagement, and get opinions from my audience. I make probably between 50 and 100+ posts a day, and that's just enough to get noticed by a handful of people. And while that eats up a lot of time, it also devours a lot of my energy for the day, because even a relatively mindless activity still takes time and effort to get through.

But "the hustle" as so many folks refer to trying to blast my signal across social media loudly enough to overcome the algorithm, is the backbone of my earnings. I could write dozens of books and hundreds of TTRPG guides, but if I don't tell anyone, no one is going to find them and buy them.

For example, did you see this one drop last weekend?

On those days where either a particular social media site is down, or when my Internet connection isn't working, I get so much more work done because it gives me back 3-4 hours a day I can use to write short stories, expand adventure modules, work on scripts for my podcast, record and edit videos and audio dramas, or any of the dozen other things I have deadlines for.

This is where the reality of being a professional creative, and the perception people have of the profession, deviate. Because it does not matter at the end of the day how much stuff I (or anyone else) creates. It matters what we sell. So if no one is watching, reading, or buying, we don't get paid, and that can very quickly turn into a death spiral for our careers.

I talked about this very thing a while back on Tabletop Mercenary over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel, and it was a truth that a lot of people didn't want to hear.

Active Audience Members Reduce The Need For The Hustle

As I said back in You Can't Make A Living Doing That? Says Who!?, an active audience makes a world of difference to any creator. Because even a relatively small number of active supports can be what makes or breaks a creator's career. And just so we're all on the same page, an active supporter is someone who interacts with a creator's content, and who does their best to deliberately support said creator. That might mean they leave them a tip every now and again, it might mean they support them on Patreon, or it could mean they buy that creator's merch whether it be tee shirts and hoodies, or books and TTRPG supplements. Alternatively, it could be people who read free articles which still pay the creator, who watch YouTube videos, and who follow on social media, share posts around, and leave comments of at least 7 words (since the algorithm has decided that's the big number).

Just to throw some numbers at you, let's say I had 500 people who wanted to actively support me. What kind of benefit would that be?

- $500 a month in Patreon/Ko-Fi earnings ($1 per supporter) would mean I could easily and reliably pay my portion of the rent with no sweating (and it would be an increase of nearly $300 in what I pull in every month). And if those supporters wanted to do $2 a month? Holy damn would I have a massive weight off my shoulders!

- 500 novel sales per month would be roughly $1,000 in royalties. And given that I have 4 novels and 2 short story collections on the market, those 500 supporters could easily earn me $6,000 or more over the course of half a year just buying 1 book a month... something that, for a lot of folks, isn't that big of a cost.

- 500 people reading 1 article per day on my Vocal.media archive would net me 15,000 additional reads... and at $6 per 1K reads, would net me a bonus $90 a month. Not as life-changing, but it would be a nice little bonus, and it would take most of a year for those supporters to read my entire archive only going through 1 article a day!

- 500 people watching 1 YouTube video a day over at the Azukail Games YouTube channel would be a bonus 15,000 additional views at the end of the month. While numbers vary for ad revenue, that would earn somewhere between $30 and $50 on average. Not a huge impact, but sharing those videos, and leaving comments on them, would massively help, and it would likely give the channel the huge visibility boost it would need to grow large enough to become semi-self sustaining. And if we just grew 500 additional subscribers, that would both put us over 2,000 subs, while also sending a message to the algorithm to pay more attention to us.

Now, 500 people sounds like a lot of folks... but there are FB groups and subreddits with tens of thousands of members. Getting 500 people is a fraction of the people who populate those places. The problem is that most people take a very passive role when it comes to how they consume art. They look casually, and then they move on, rather than interacting and supporting, which is what creators need in order to survive. It is, after all, the reason we spend so much damn time making posts and promoting our work.

So if you want to see the creators you love make fewer social media posts about their books, videos, supplements, etc.? Become an active supporter, and try to recruit some of your circle into doing the same. Because every, single one of you is making a real difference in the lives of an artist... whether you feel like it, or not!

Also, if you think an artist has so much support that they don't need you to help, I'd like to remind you that audience size is a reverse iceberg... however big it looks, it's likely not even 10% the size of what you're seeing.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

Self-Promotion, Capitalism, and The Unreasonable Demand of "Community Spirit"

If you are an author (or really any kind of creative professional) you have to hustle 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in order to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. While there are some of us who've managed to build a big enough audience that we don't have to stand on the equivalent of an Internet street corner like a carnival barker, the exception very much proves the rule in this case. As folks say, even Dickens had to host public readings and hand-sell his books in order to keep his belly full.

Which brings me to today's topic... the double-edged sword of the Internet, and how so many people on it treat creators who are just trying to pay their rent.

Flame war? Oh, that's gonna make this an easy month...

And as always, if you want to get all of my fresh news, content, and more, sign up for my weekly newsletter!

ABC... Always Be Closing

I mentioned this back in How Do You Sell Books? Alec Baldwin Has The Answer, but I thought I'd repeat it for folks who missed it. His famous scene in the film Glengarry Glen Ross, where Baldwin plays a hotshot salesman violently berating a team of underperformers who aren't making their quota, lays it out one of the central tenets of successful salesmanship; Always Be Closing. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter who you're talking to, keep your eyes on that prize and do what you need to do to make that sale. Soft sell, hard sell, whatever you have to do you get them to sign on the dotted line, and close the deal.

It's a powerful scene, and even though it's Baldwin's only appearance in the film it got him nominated for an Oscar. It also illustrates the point quite neatly for anyone who is not an author who's wondering why it seems like every post we make is trying to get someone to buy our books... it's because we have to do that. Most of us do not have publicists, legions of adoring fans, or publishers with massive marketing budgets... we have ourselves, and however far we can project our voices.

And because we are struggling under capitalism, we usually don't have a safety net we can rely on. No regular monthly check, no health insurance, no housing vouchers... and that means we sink or swim based on our work, and how many people we can get to read it.

Conflict arises, though, because the very places we go to get traction (subreddits, forums, Facebook groups, or MeWe for the truly desperate among us) usually don't understand the nature of this hustle. So while we're trying to offer them the products of our imaginations, they're shouting about how we need to, "do it the right way," if we're going to promote our work in their space.

I will say this right here. Nine times out of ten when someone says, "I don't mind if you do it, but you have to do it the right way," what they're really saying is they don't want you to do it at all. Because as soon as you start discussing what the "right way" is they start getting angry and defensive, saying that if someone needs to explain it to you then you don't belong here anyway.

"Community Spirit" is Basically Just Demanding Free Labor

The most common requirement you see from these groups is that you need to be an "active participant" in the community. What they mean, of course, is that you have to make posts that are completely separate from your actual work in order to balance the scales.

To put it another way, they expect you to take time, effort, and energy to create free content for their community in exchange for allowing you to share a link to your book, your article, your blog, or your game. That's time you often don't have, and word count that would normally be worth money, just so that you can maybe, potentially find a follower, sell a book, etc.

Authors die of exposure every year, friends.

As a quick example, say that I went to a FB gaming page, and shared my post The 5 Awful Paladins You Meet in Your Gaming Career. It's a pretty long article that I spent a lot of time writing, finding the right photos for, etc., etc. Not only that, but it's free to anyone who wants to read it... all you have to do is click the link and bam, the content is right there in your hand.

Even in this situation, where the content is on-topic to the group, and where it's free of charge, people complain. They complain that they have to go to another site to see it, they complain that you didn't copy-and-paste all the content onto the post itself, or they complain that you're just there to make money... as if somehow you could devote your entire career to creating in a certain genre and not also be a fan of that genre.

And that's the point where my bullshit detector starts going off.

Because that's what the complaints boil down to more often than not if you learn to read between the lines. It's not that what you're sharing is off-topic, or that it doesn't apply here. In fact, if someone not you was sharing it, that would be fine and dandy with them! The problem only arises because you're the author, and you will make money from the activity surrounding this post. Which to their minds means you are feeding off the life force of their community... because they're here for the "pure" enjoyment of genre fiction, tabletop gaming, fun history facts, etc., but you've been tainted by your need to make money off of what (for them) is something they do for enjoyment.

So until you "prove" yourself to them (usually by making a lot of posts to show that you are totally willing to make content for free) you will never be truly part of the community in their eyes.

If You Don't Want Promotion, You Won't Have Creators

To be clear, here, I am not saying that all self-promotion should be allowed from all creators at all times. That is how you open the floodgates. However, it is far more reasonable to set limits on type and number of promotional posts (post no more than once a week, don't post about the same project twice in a month, etc., etc.) than it is to have some vague, amorphous, "Well, when we have deemed you are an 'active participant' in the community, then we will allow you to occasionally stand on your soap box and share your work with us," standard.

If you don't want creators talking about their projects and posting links to their work, bite the bullet and say so. Just understand that we are busy people, and we don't have blocks of time set aside every day to make unrelated social media posts to prove to strangers that we're genuine fans of the things we make for a living. You can't have your cake and eat it, in this case, because no matter how welcoming, how friendly, or how engaged a community is, you cannot pay rent, buy food, or keep your heat on with the positive regard and admiration of others if it is not, in some way, translated into enough earnings to pay your bills at the end of the month.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!