Being Your Own Advocate in the Long Tail

The long tail is a relative thing, as are all distributional concepts. “The 1%” by construction can only exist if there is another 99, “the bottom billion” stand in relation to the remainder. The tail is continuous with the head of any power law distribution, so where you would draw the line is really a matter of where you’re standing and how hard you squint. The Ümlaut is firmly in the long tail relative to Forbes, Bloomberg, or Vox, though to many we may appear closer to the head. From the distance of one of the vast sea of personal blogs out there, merely averaging 100 views a day can look like the head. How do you make the leap to the big time, when the head remains so far in the horizon? The answer, I think, is something like one part persuasion and a thousand parts luck.

In the heady days of the mid-oughts, when home prices were soaring and “Web 2.0” was a term used unironically to imply distance and progress from the dot-com crash, the great defeated foe of the day was the gatekeeper. Newspapers, publishers, movie studios, and record labels; anyone who you used to have to ask permission from in order to get you expressive work out in public — these were the gatekeepers. From the moment that Internet connectivity and web adoption spread widely enough, they ceased to be so. The truth behind Web 2.0 as a concept were things like blogs which reduced the necessary knowhow and the transaction costs to putting writing out in public. Services like Flickr and YouTube did the same for images and video, respectively, and for a while MySpace was a big hub for aspiring musicians.

Chris Anderson was the one who popularized the notion of the long tail. He wrote an article, blogged for a couple of years at thelongtail.com, and then put out a book. For those of us following the conversation in media at the time, Anderson was very much in the thick of things. He linked liberally to the big political and media bloggers of the day, and wrote his thoughts on topics inspired by their posts as well as other things he was reading. This run-up to the book persuaded many people that the book would be worth buying. Heck, 19-year-old greenhorn that I was, I only discovered Anderson, and Wired, and his eventual book at all because people I read linked to his blog. From my vantage point he seemed to occupy the same space as Instapundit, Kos, Jeff Jarvis, and a sea of mid and lower level bloggers whose candles have long since burned out (or migrated to Twitter).

Yet of course, meaningful distinctions exist here. Chris Anderson was editor-in-chief of the print edition of Wired at the time, and Wired is a Condé Nast property. An old style publishing gatekeeper if ever there was one! When a book’s author starts out with such advantages, they’re pretty lucky. But Anderson didn’t leave it to just his luck — he grabbed onto the new tools of public conversation and made the case for his upcoming book. He did so not by arguing that you should buy or preorder it, but simply through participation in the ongoing conversations of the time. He did it by presenting himself as the kind of person who would write the kind of book that a particular audience would want to read. And it paid off, though of course we cannot know how much the blogging contributed to his success.

Scott Sumner is a clearer case. No single voice moved the consensus about our macroeconomic predicament more than he did. Yet he seemed to come out of nowhere. Sumner, a fairly humble guy, will tell tell you the sudden attention was mostly luck — in particular, an early link to his blog from Marginal Revolution. But persuasion of course played a huge role. He blogged almost religiously, with a volume of output to put content farm writers to shame. And these were long, carefully argued pieces taking on the narratives that dominated the post-2008 macroeconomic conversation. Moreover, he responded at length to just about every comment, even as comments predictably ballooned in number with his growing readership. He was in the thick of things, not flinching from fighting it out with just about anyone who was willing to engage with him.

Stories like Sumner’s, or Matthew Yglesias’s or Ezra Klein’s, are enough to make you think that attention like that is just a few short steps away. And indeed, when people achieve that kind of attention, it can happen in almost the blink of an eye; in a big burst of the sort you see when a single story or image or video goes viral. But the gap is actually quite vast, and it is filled mostly with other people like you who want what you want and are willing to do all the things you are willing to do in order to get there.

The market for these things looks basically the way that the market for acting has always looked, only moreso. Whereas aspiring actors in New York are competing against hordes of other aspiring actors, aspiring writers in this day and age are competing against anyone who can write in their language anywhere in the world, because all of us can be read by anyone anywhere else in the world. So the most important step is to prepare yourself for the very likely eventuality that you will never get any kind of significant audience.

Just because you come to terms with that, however, doesn’t mean that you should give up being an advocate for yourself. It starts, obviously, with actually writing regularly. The more you write, the more likely someone is going to happen upon something you wrote at some point and think it’s worth sharing. But then you also have to go out and talk to other people who share your interests. Bringing up something you’ve written in casual conversation, or in the comments section of something they’ve written, is OK so long as it is on topic and it’s clear that you’ve been paying attention to what you’re responding to. The fine line between acceptably advocating yourself and just being a spammer is having a sense of decorum; carefully reading the situation and the other person.

At the end of the day a more likely scenario than getting a wide readership is that you will persuade some people that you’re a fun guy to talk to and trade written works with. And connecting with people like that, forming communities of shared interest, is far more enriching than mere pageviews. Unlike fame, such communities are accessible to basically all of us, though becoming accepted as part of them is no less a matter of advocacy and persuasion.