FYI, the "PETE Best got kicked out of the Beatles, not Chris Best" comments have already come rolling in. Damn it. Well, if you didn't know already know that I'm a moron, now's a great time to find out.
So maybe this is a moron question but I'm sorry, I gotta ask it:
Let's say you weren't on The Daily Show (where you got your cred to guest-post on Slow Boring, and be interviewed on the Gist), how would you go about building your audience? Like say, if you were a true nobody?
This is not at all a dumb question (and if it matters, I wrote for Last Week Tonight, not the Daily Show).
I think the simple answer is: Without LWT, the Gist and Slow Boring and other things would not have happened. But a more complex answer would look at how I ended up at LWT. And how I got there was roughly a thousand stand-up shows (I estimated the number at one point) until I finally got noticed and became a person who could submit a packet. I submitted a packet and got the job. And I got to a thousand stand-up shows by starting with The World's Shittiest Open Mic, and then doing The World's Second Shittiest Open Mic, etc. So: You start with a very small thing, and then try to roll that into a slightly bigger thing, and so on, and so on. You basically One Red Paperclip your way into a career.
That's the THEORY, anyway. And I'm here talking like a big shot as if I've got it all figured out, but let me note that I'm very much IN this process, not at the end of it. IMBW is a basically a start-up in the very early days; the trend lines are good but I'm a long way from where I want to be.
I will also, for what it's worth, not defend the system that we have for a fraction of a second. As I said on the podcast, I'm convinced that a lot of talent simply never gets discovered. But luckily for me, your question seemed to be less "how SHOULD it work?" and more "how DOES it work?, and hopefully I was able to speak to the second question a little bit.
I'm truly mortified that I wrote "The Daily Show" instead of "Last Week Tonight" so I'm going to find the shortest pier I can walk a marathon off of. Goodbye forever!
(I really appreciate you responding to my comment!)
May 11, 2022·edited May 11, 2022Liked by Jeff Maurer
V-e-d-d-y i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g. I thought sure I'd learn the deep, dark secrets to success from Chris--who should know if anybody does--so I sat through the entire thing, not just for that, but because you both held me captive. I had to laugh at your takes on Matty Yglesias. I have mixed feelings about him, at best, but I'll have to agree that he is a good writer. And he must be doing something right, because he has an audience about 30 gazillion times bigger than mine.
But I mainly came here to ease your mind about a Twitter presence. Don't waste a minute of your valuable time trying to promo your writing there. Unless you're already famous, with a name that's known to everyone, any attempt at getting that crowd to read what you've written will cause terrible anxiety and maybe even shuddery tears.
I can get thousands of hits over some stupid thing I've said off the top of my head, but ask that same bunch to take a look at something I've sweated blood writing? They're nowhere to be found. Once I asked if they could actually see my posts and got two answers. The first one was 'Yup', and the second was something about Twitter being bad at algorithms or something.
So forget it. You're doing the right thing. I love Twitter for so many things, but promoting my own writing isn't one of them.
Have you considered just starting a beef with some other Substack author? This seems like what a rapper would do. If he didn’t get into it with T.I. about who was the real King of the South, I’m not sure I’d ever have come to know about Lil’ Flip. I bet if you started spitting some G shit at Yascha Mounk, that traffic would start rolling in on dubs.
I was second on the Pete vs. Chris Best thing, but hey, Jeff's accurate to funny ratio is well within tolerances. I think I actually am going to start a substack after listening to this so . . . . Good job Chris Best!
FYI, the "PETE Best got kicked out of the Beatles, not Chris Best" comments have already come rolling in. Damn it. Well, if you didn't know already know that I'm a moron, now's a great time to find out.
This was fun, thanks for having me. Hello fellow subscribers.
It was great. As a serial substacker I'm with you 💯
So maybe this is a moron question but I'm sorry, I gotta ask it:
Let's say you weren't on The Daily Show (where you got your cred to guest-post on Slow Boring, and be interviewed on the Gist), how would you go about building your audience? Like say, if you were a true nobody?
This is not at all a dumb question (and if it matters, I wrote for Last Week Tonight, not the Daily Show).
I think the simple answer is: Without LWT, the Gist and Slow Boring and other things would not have happened. But a more complex answer would look at how I ended up at LWT. And how I got there was roughly a thousand stand-up shows (I estimated the number at one point) until I finally got noticed and became a person who could submit a packet. I submitted a packet and got the job. And I got to a thousand stand-up shows by starting with The World's Shittiest Open Mic, and then doing The World's Second Shittiest Open Mic, etc. So: You start with a very small thing, and then try to roll that into a slightly bigger thing, and so on, and so on. You basically One Red Paperclip your way into a career.
That's the THEORY, anyway. And I'm here talking like a big shot as if I've got it all figured out, but let me note that I'm very much IN this process, not at the end of it. IMBW is a basically a start-up in the very early days; the trend lines are good but I'm a long way from where I want to be.
I will also, for what it's worth, not defend the system that we have for a fraction of a second. As I said on the podcast, I'm convinced that a lot of talent simply never gets discovered. But luckily for me, your question seemed to be less "how SHOULD it work?" and more "how DOES it work?, and hopefully I was able to speak to the second question a little bit.
I'm truly mortified that I wrote "The Daily Show" instead of "Last Week Tonight" so I'm going to find the shortest pier I can walk a marathon off of. Goodbye forever!
(I really appreciate you responding to my comment!)
V-e-d-d-y i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g. I thought sure I'd learn the deep, dark secrets to success from Chris--who should know if anybody does--so I sat through the entire thing, not just for that, but because you both held me captive. I had to laugh at your takes on Matty Yglesias. I have mixed feelings about him, at best, but I'll have to agree that he is a good writer. And he must be doing something right, because he has an audience about 30 gazillion times bigger than mine.
But I mainly came here to ease your mind about a Twitter presence. Don't waste a minute of your valuable time trying to promo your writing there. Unless you're already famous, with a name that's known to everyone, any attempt at getting that crowd to read what you've written will cause terrible anxiety and maybe even shuddery tears.
I can get thousands of hits over some stupid thing I've said off the top of my head, but ask that same bunch to take a look at something I've sweated blood writing? They're nowhere to be found. Once I asked if they could actually see my posts and got two answers. The first one was 'Yup', and the second was something about Twitter being bad at algorithms or something.
So forget it. You're doing the right thing. I love Twitter for so many things, but promoting my own writing isn't one of them.
Matt Yglesias is good, actually.
Counterpoint: he's a curate's egg at best.
Have you considered just starting a beef with some other Substack author? This seems like what a rapper would do. If he didn’t get into it with T.I. about who was the real King of the South, I’m not sure I’d ever have come to know about Lil’ Flip. I bet if you started spitting some G shit at Yascha Mounk, that traffic would start rolling in on dubs.
I’ve often wondered if we should have an official beef feature that is basically recommendations but the opposite..
Pete
Rose
I was second on the Pete vs. Chris Best thing, but hey, Jeff's accurate to funny ratio is well within tolerances. I think I actually am going to start a substack after listening to this so . . . . Good job Chris Best!