nobody cares (except people who care)

a somewhat sentimental thank you to notebook readers

i couldn’t really find a better picture for this

There’s a common refrain I run across whenever I find myself with a new interest: you have to remember, nobody cares about this. This statement has been floating around books and such forever—nobody reads. (I suspect but cannot prove the problem is rather, nobody knows how to reach readers.) When I’m reading stuff on pop music forums, people frequently assert nobody cares about pop music. (What is the “pop” part, then?) Fragrance forums—nobody really cares about fragrance. But fragrance is big business, right? Somebody must care.¹

On some level, these statements are just different versions of the Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule, which in this case means that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customer base. That is also what you see in action when you see those alarming graphs about i.e. alcohol purchases where most people purchase, I dunno, a bottle of wine once a year and then twenty percent of people purchase a lot of alcohol. One might say, too much alcohol.²

Would it be correct to say that “nobody cares” about alcohol? It depends on what you mean by “caring.” Even among people who “care about alcohol” in the sense that they belong to the 20%, there’s a distinction between people who might sample widely and connoisseurs of particular types. And then a difference again between them and the professionals, between people who have a discerning palate for wine and the people who drink vintage wine, etc. But does this mean that “nobody” has preferences, enjoys alcohol, etc? I think no.

So what “nobody cares” really means, most of the time, is that most people don’t care like hobbyists and enthusiasts and professionals care about any given object. This does not mean:

• that they don’t care.

• that nobody cares.

This point feels dumb and trivial, but I’m actually not sure if it is. It’s possible to get people interested in what interests you if that’s what you want to do. The number of people you can get interested will fluctuate by topic and by the means available to you. And the easiest way (in my experience) to convince people to try being interested in things is just to proceed with the confidence that those things are interesting and that other people will see what you see if you keep looking at it (and then they might even see it and argue with you, which is nice). Also, I’m sorry for using the word “interesting” so many times here but I could not find a way around it.

The other day I had one of those moments when you feel like you’ve uncovered some sort of hidden assumption that has sat behind your thinking for some time. It was that some people write for “writers” and some people write for “readers.”³ By this distinction I don’t mean to delineate anything about style or content or high / low / middle browness or institutional affiliation or anything else. I mean: some people write to their professional peers first and foremost. Other people write with the idea of non-professionals first and foremost.⁴

Maybe ten years ago, “writing for writers,” for a new writer, might have looked like “I hope Arts & Letters Daily will pick me up” or “I hope this or that higher-placed person tweets the link.” A successful piece enlarged your reputation with your peers.⁵ “Writing for readers” might look like “I want to see that somebody with no professional reason to read this read it,” or reading the comments and feeling gratified by them.

In practice, there’s probably nobody who comes down cleanly on one side or the other here. I assume most people like the idea of being read with admiration by their peers and they also like the idea that there might be a middle manager in Spokane, totally invisible to them, who really looks forward to their latest missive.⁶ So—this is kind of a fake way of thinking about the orientation people have toward their work. (In this sense, realizing it was a way I was splitting people up was pretty helpful, because I realized that I should stop.) Nevertheless, it’s not completely fake and it helped me understand why I have taken to newsletter writing so much.

That is, part of why I like writing this newsletter so much is that I feel connected to readers. I do believe that up to a certain point, writers create their audiences.⁷ (Once you pass a certain bar in terms of popularity, however, that’s no longer true.) I am just some guy being read by other people who are also just some guy. Even if you’re somebody elsewhere, on Substack, you are just some guy and you’ll always just be some guy.⁸ But the truth is—I like being some guy. Like Columbo. It’s more fun.

---

However, being some guy can come with drawbacks. For instance: one of my favorite writers as a kid was Peter S. Beagle. When I was a teen I remember looking him up and being shocked and horrified to discover that he was (I believe) on the verge of losing his house. When other writers explained why he himself was not as financially successful or stable as you might have thought, one answer they’d give was that he was always writing different kinds of books.⁹ (It would also be true, frankly, to say that his first two books were his best. But that’s never stopped somebody from making money.…)

I never understood this—surely you want people to be writing different kinds of books? Wouldn’t that make somebody a really popular writer, because you’d always want to know what they’d be doing next? (And isn’t a common criticism of various novelists that they do keep writing the same book over and over?) Then when I started writing, I did get it. What these people were trying to say was that Beagle didn’t have brand and he didn’t capitalize on the moment he could have had one. Beagle knew that The Last Unicorn was a perfect book that should not have a sequel, so he didn’t write one.¹⁰ He was happy to hop genres. It meant his readers lost track of him easily. It meant he was often starting every book as if from zero.

But by the time I got what they meant, I also had begun to realize I myself was like this too—that I wanted to hop. So I was like—well, that isn’t good. But what can you do? If it’s your nature, aren’t you just sort of stuck like that? I’ve never contemplated having a single solid writerly identity without feeling like a big icy hand is gripping my heart (and developing a corresponding need to bolt out the door).

And I feel like this newsletter has offered me a solution. Everybody who subscribes and stays is somebody who understands this aspect of me and my work and likes it. You are here for hopping around among Taylor Swift, perfume, cartoons, classic literature, and mice. So—thanks. I’ve had a hard few years, frankly! But you’ve helped to make them better. Here’s to hopping.

1. And even their definition of not caring is somebody who owns a bottle or two of perfume that are their faithful standbys, i.e., about 200% more caring than my own bar for “not caring” (neither owning nor wearing perfume).

2. My gins… my beautiful gins…

3. For related reading, check out this piece that went up just today:

Intellectual Networks

4. Even “professional peers” can probably be further sub-divided to “editors” and “writers,” and in terms of career, it is vastly more important to be a writer editors like than to be a writer other writers like.

5. Now it might be… “I hope so-and-so subscribes to my substack”? I don’t know.

6. Furthermore, success in both cases is isolating. The more successful you get a larger number of your peers resent you and the less able you are to interact with readers without being turned into an oracle. (That said, writer-famous is still… writer-famous. You don’t need to wear sunglasses to go grocery shopping.)

7. As mentioned before here.

8. When you don’t have a job you really feel the degree to which you kind of don’t exist. Or rather, you exist only to the extent you make yourself exist. But you lack an identifying “tag” and you can’t be useful to others. But on Substack, in a sense, everybody is equally unemployed.

9. In Beagle’s case, I’m not sure that’s the most important reason—his biggest problem was not being paid the money he was contractually owed for the movie of The Last Unicorn.

10. He caved eventually but he should’ve stood firm.