Reader Burnout is Upon Us
Reader Burnout is Upon Us
How do we writers break through?
As a reader I’m at total burnout stage. Everywhere I look, everywhere I go online, there’s something to read, with more websites cropping up every day, with more writers demanding my attention, and sometimes my money.
It’s sort of my job to pay attention to these things, and I’ve been everywhere lately, so I admit I may be the cause of my own burnout. It’s not just social media, which would be one thing, but there are all those websites devoted to nothing but essays. Thousands and thousands and thousands of essays.
How many do you think there are here at Substack alone? I have no idea but last year Hamish said there were over a million paid subscribers. That was more than a year ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if that number has doubled. Substack is growing by the minute.
But Substack is only one site. Medium is another. There are hundreds more. Now we have social experiments like Mastodon and Post News and Tribel, besides Instagram and TikTok. All of them vying for top place in a readership competition.
So where does that leave writers? I’d say in the worst place possible. I was thinking about the publications that were around when I was young. Magazines and newspapers, mainly. There were fewer places for writers to roost, but then there were fewer writers vying for position. Monthly magazines were the main source of articles and short fiction, with weeklies concentrating more on pictures than text. Daily newspapers flourished, but freelance essays, even political opinions, were few and far between. Most were syndicated, appearing in hundreds of papers weekly. Not everyone dreamed of being a successful writer. It was a dream far beyond most peoples’ reach. Writing for publications took training. Everybody knew that.
We’re in a different place now. Blogging changed everything. Anyone could blog and everyone did. Some lucky buggers even made a living from blogging, and we zeroed in on their successes and saw our futures in self-publishing. Our every brilliant thought out there with a push of a ‘Publish’ button. Awesome! Blogging became so common it killed off any notion of rising above the masses. We were one in many millions and the few who actually did make it kept the rest of us salivating and hoping.
So what chances do we have now? Again, I have no idea. The rise in self-publishing or writing for free is staggering and terrifying. It’s demoralizing. It’s enough to bring on the vapors or to take up drinking again. Just when we get to the point where our writing is at ‘personal best’ stage, the other ‘personal bests’ threaten to sweep right over us and wipe us out.
How do we compete when we don’t even know what the rules are anymore? We used to have editors and publishers who would make those decisions for us. Either they took what we wrote and paid us for it or they didn’t. They could make us or break us. It helped to have friends who could put in a good word, but mainly we were on our own with only our words as a catalyst for potential success.
Most of us were wise enough to know we were on the losing end and we learned to live with it. We did what we could and didn’t waste time agonizing over what could be; what should be. And many of us moved on.
Only poets stayed in the game and wrote for free. They lived for their words and to hell with the market.
It sounds delicious but we’re not them.
So where do we go from here? I don’t expect to make a living with my writing, but then I never did. The most I ever made in one year of freelancing was $10,000 and that included money I got from teaching writing. It’s a tough world and only getting tougher.
So let’s talk about dreams and reality. Where are you throughout all of this? What about niche-writing? Is reader burnout as common in a niche? I suspect it’s not, but not all of us can stick to one topic. If you’re anything like me, you’re all over the place. The two topics I get the most feedback from are widowhood and ageing. I’m getting to be an expert at both, but I don’t want to be slotted as that writer. I want to be all over the place.
How about you? Let’s talk. Comments, as always, are open.
I write a pretty niche Substack -- a weekly guide to children’s books, raising readers, and how to build a culture of reading in your home -- and my experience over the past 2.5+ years is that some subscribers will read every single thing I write, some read most, some read some, some read very little, a few read none. People subscribe and unsubscribe every day. Readers come, readers go. I assume everyone reads what they want, when they can, and even people who sign up for a newsletter about children's books sometimes don't want to read about children's books (and sometimes I don't even want to write about them!)
I see all of this as part of the process now. There are more words in the world waiting for eyeballs to fall upon them than there have ever been before, at any moment in history. And yet, reading isn't going away, or anywhere else, anytime soon.
I write because I want to, not because I have to (and I certainly don't depend upon Substack to put food on my table or a roof over my head). I enjoy it, and I'll keep doing it as long as I enjoy it, and I'll quit when I no longer do. I find the less I hope to "break through," the less attached I am to that outcome, the more I can keep enjoying it.
God yes!!! Eclecticism is the bees knees! I'm glad you write across a vast range of subjects!
and yes, so much to read these days that one could drown in the tsunami of words out there.
I'm so new to this Substack phenomenon that I just write the way I wrote my blog and because my blog was free, Knots in the String will probably remain free too. Is that a good thing? It is for me because I don;t feel any responsibility to give 'value for money'. People either subscribe or they don't.
Substack has been a marvellous writing discipline just when I need a reboot as I had stalled as a novelist.
I don't care about the numbers. I just want to please any readers who stumble my way. I don't rely on the income and it was only early on in the glory days of indie writing (2010-2104) that I was truly making money from my novels. That changed in 2015-16 when the indie marketplace was swamped with an increasing load of abysmal, unedited and amateurish publications.
The lesson I learned then was not to hang on sales but to put energy into enjoying the writing of a good book and putting out the most professional novel I could.
One really edifying thing is that the pundits all swore reading would die back in the day. To see everyone reading, whether it be digital or paper, is the best thing in the world.
Words never die...