Arise! Zombie Writer
On starting a whole career from scratch... again
Dear reader,
Thank you for choosing Plato Was a Dick – the S Peter Davis newsletter.
We realise you have a choice in who gets to slide into your inbox every week to natter at you about whatever the fuck happens to be on our mind and we, by which I mean I, appreciate your eye for quality.
It’s been one year now since a viral tweet netted me my first 30 or so subscribers who weren’t personal friends. If you were one of them, thanks for sticking with me! Can you believe it’s been a whole year? That viral tweet, by the way, only got traction in the first place because it was retweeted by my former boss from Cracked, Jason Pargin. As far as I know, Jason is too busy to read my stuff so that motherfucker might never know he’s basically responsible for launching my whole writing career twice.
That was also the first and last time Twitter would let me advertise my newsletter.
There was a time period, I’d put it between the mid-90s and mid-2010s, where the environment was absolutely perfect for content creators to find an audience. The internet was new, there weren’t that many people here yet, and everyone was able to split off into our little niche interest groups where whatever your weird shit was could be embraced and celebrated or avoided like leprosy. I had a Sonic the Hedgehog website. I can’t believe I found the ruins of it on Wayback machine.
But then the rich guys came and they decided this all needed to be ripped down and reassembled into a money printing machine. For them. Like, imagine Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos walking down the aisles of the old internet with their arms stretched out either side of themselves, knocking everything into a shopping trolley. Also their middle fingers are both pointing up. And the Crazy Frog song is playing, remember that fucking thing? Are you picturing this? Look I drew it for you:
Those who took advantage of the creative success they earned in that old internet mostly pulled the ladders up behind them, and now we’re stuck with… with this.
Being a small time content creator really gives you insight into the stupid little wars taking place in every facet of entertainment. And I’m not even talking about the Entertainment Industry as though I’m part of the Entertainment Industry. If I can entertain just one person I’ll be happy. Hell, I’ll settle for entertaining my cat.
Almost everyone wants that, though. That’s the problem, you see. If everyone tries to be noticed at the same time, all you have is noise.
Becoming a successful entertainer means finding a way to break through the noise. You need to find yourself a voice that is different in some way to all the other voices chattering away in everyone’s ears. You have to be bold and you have to be authentic and you have to be unique and the very, very worst thing you can be is boring.
Every artist is a thief. We take your time and feed ourselves on it.
Scratch that. We’re carnival barkers. Medicine salesmen. Each and every single one of us has a limited budget of time on this planet, a set number of minutes and seconds. Every person who is trying to entertain for a living wants to convince you to give some of those irretrievable minutes to us.
We can’t even cash those minutes out. I’m not going to live any longer because you read this dumb newsletter. We’re chronosynthesists. We transform your time into our feeling of self worth. And, if we’re lucky, hard cash.
Statistically, I’ve lost at least half of you by now. That’s not a whinge. It’s statistics. If you are still reading this, right now, know that a very large percentage of the other people who clicked on this have already clicked onto something else. They’re reading their other emails or checking Insta. Some of them will come back later, others won’t. If you’re still here, I thank you, and it also means I’m doing something right.
We can get a little cosier now. A little more intimate.
Don’t worry. No touchy-touch.
Folks who author newsletters with Substack get sent occasional morale-boosting emails from management that often include interviews with folks who have huge followings, explaining how they made it to the big time and how you can make yourself (and by extension Substack) lots of money. Substack is a relatively new platform so, overwhelmingly, the secret to most of its big clients’ success is “already have a huge platform somewhere else and export your email list to Substack.”
Those people found success when the internet was different. They held onto it. You can’t do what they do now, not the same way. They are artifacts of the old internet. I was too, and now I’m not anymore.
But know this—I’m coming back, baby.
Some of you are wary because you’re afraid I’m doing the dreaded growth post. You know the growth post. It’s where I do a screenshot of my dashboard statistics and show you my subscription graphs. I already see you moving your thumb to click away or swipe away or whatever depending on how you’re reading this, if you so much as glimpse one fucking graph you’re going back to Instagram.
I’m not going to show you my graphs! Most of you reading this right now aren’t interested in how I’ve grown over the past year. I’ll suffice to say that I’m mostly happy about it.
I will tell you a little bit about what I learned, though. Ol’ grampa Davis is gonna start rambling about the Old Internet again.
Shut your pie hole, kid. Before I slap the bejesus out of you.
(That is how we talked on the Old Internet. None of this based no cap hornyposting on main shit.)
I was over on the Substack subreddit the other day. Oh, by the way, did you know there’s a Substack subreddit? Just dozens of people either posting their newsletter links (nobody clicks) or asking how to grow their newsletter (nobody knows). Anyway, there was a guy asking about how to deal with that deep, crushing feeling that comes from staring at the viewership stats and never seeing the needle move. Nobody is clicking. Those who do, don’t stick around. Those who stick around sure as hell don’t sign up for a paid subscription.
I didn’t have the heart to tell the kid the cold truth, which is that the reason your subscribers don’t grow is because everybody has a newsletter now and everybody’s time is limited and you are part of the noise now.
The reason there’s so much noise, the reason nobody can shout above it anymore, is that the platform owners want the noise. They want it to stay noise. A limited number of talented individuals getting attention for their craft doesn’t help Elon Musk at all. One billion people talking at the same time and sounding like chattering insects no matter how talented they are or how worthwhile any one thing they say might be—that’s what helps him. That’s the media billionaire’s preferred ecosystem. They don’t want any one of you to succeed and they will tweak their algorithms, kill your links, deboost you, demoralise you, squash you, bury you, and make damn sure you have no options.
We’re nothing but a slush pool of creative energy fuelling other people’s machines.
The only weapon any of us have is patience. Patience and determination and time.
I was once part of something Big on the Old Internet. Getting hired by Cracked was the most important thing I’ve ever fucked up. It paid well enough for me to finally get a place of my own and escape roommate hell. I was an important part of an important thing, and I didn’t take it seriously enough when I had it, and when I finally got my shit together and started putting my whole ass into it, I had no idea the whole thing had about two years left on the clock.
Ten years of writing and they’d only just started putting my name on the damn articles when the whole operation went belly up. I didn’t even have a Twitter account—that was a big mistake.
Losing that job, not through lack of effort but just because the platform owners didn’t want it around anymore, was the worst thing that ever happened to me because it felt like, well, okay, back into the cobalt mines with me. I cried and mourned and complained. The one thing I wanted to do since my grandmother gave me a box of letter-shaped refrigerator magnets was be a writer, and I was supposed to spend the rest of my life doing that, and now it was behind me? I’d done it and it was fucking behind me? I’m not even 40.
Statistically about 17-20% of you are still reading. That’s not a whinge, that’s just statistics.
You guys, you’re the real shit. You’re my buddies. We’re here together. We can get cozier now.
No second base, I promise.
But let me tell you a secret, just us 20 percenters. The other 80% are no less loved, they just have other shit to do today. Or they have Instagram. That means you inner circlers get to hear something now that the rest won’t find out until later:
I’m coming back.
This post brings to a close my first twelve months as a free agent, as a nobody with a newsletter, as a time thief, your time thief, not writing in the Cracked Voice, as the editors called it, no filter, no help of any kind, and the verdict is I fucking like it.
Every time the platform owners have tweaked something to try to stop me I have found a way around it, mostly, so far.
I have plans for this. I hope some of them will work. If you signed up this year and you’ve come with me this far, I invite you to stick around. If you’re just joining us, welcome. You guys got in on the ground floor. Now we’re just getting started.
We’re going to have a laugh together.
If you read all the way through to here you deserve to see this photo of my cats.
One of the first things I did after starting my Substack was unsubscribe from the morale boosting emails from management.
That was a great piece. I read all the way to the end. I saw the cats.