Peer to Peer?
How to develop a community?
Yesterday
interviewed Leslie Castro-Woodhouse, a "recovering academic" who has begun a developmental editing business online. I thought this was particularly interesting, because it's something that friends have suggested I might want to try. I enjoyed a project I just did for the West Virginia University Press, reviewing a manuscript by a recent graduate from the PhD program at UMass (where I also got a PhD). I do seem to like that type of thing. Not sure I'd want to do it as a business. Maybe as a contractor for someone else who was doing something similar, but in a slightly adjacent space. I wonder whether there are writing coaches like Leslie who would be interested in expanding their businesses. It's a sort-of strange skillset to try to mash together, combining the things you need to be good at to be an effective coach with the other things you need to be good at to effectively market yourself as one. I think this is often a limiting factor, the way the web-made rags-to-riches dream currently works.I think it's also valuable to begin with a community you're already in, before throwing it out to the whole world. Recently I chatted with a colleague who has been a university professor for going on a decade but who is way behind on his journal article production and hasn't finished a book. He agreed it would be interesting to talk about this type of thing, but I'm not sure that meant he'd be willing to support it with $. I think a lot of junior academics develop peer groups to help each other along and workshop their writing. Maybe it would make sense to try to create a peer-to-peer thing as a non-profit, rather than trying to cash in with services offered for a fee.
Another couple of elements that I suspect are in a state of rapid change that complicates the picture are the publishing landscape and academia itself. An editor with connections, especially into the key journals of a particular field, would probably be very valuable in helping a junior professor get their article published. Someone who has played the game successfully of either finding and working with a good agent or placing a manuscript directly with a publisher after a long struggle would also probably be very valuable to aspiring authors. I'm not that person, and I don't think I'm that interested in trying to become that person or pretending I am. I had an incredibly easy time getting the manuscript based on my dissertation accepted by the Yale University Press. I think this was a combination of having a dissertation advisor who had published his first book with Yale, and the manuscript just being really good. Neither of these seems like something I could "sell", beyond the claim that having written a good book, I might be a good editor. And the publishing landscape is changing rapidly. What worked for me four years ago might not even be relevant anymore.
And then there's the erosion of the academic landscape itself. My "tenure" book came out during my third year as a university assistant professor. It's now my sixth year. Rather than applying for tenure and promotion, which was the plan, I'm being laid off at the end of this semester along with 26 other tenured and tenure-track faculty. Although there are still colleges and universities out there, the demographic shift associated with the end of population growth (not to mention the changes catalyzed by COVID) suggests big changes in the academy. But maybe the challenge is also an opportunity. Joshua's blog is called "The Recovering Academic", after all. This suggests there are at least some people who have interests and skills that they're interested in applying to the different-but-similar work of communicating with the general public.
This is really exciting for me. I've always been more interested in writing history for (and about) regular people as for fellow historians. When I was a grad student I eagerly blogged for The Historical Society, contributing 46 posts between 2010 and 2013. The aim of the blog was to talk about historical ideas in a way the general public would find interesting and useful. I was also a fan of self-publishing. I produced my first book, a young-adult novel called Outside the Box, in 2007 and won a prize at the Collingswood (NJ) Book Festival. I ran a variety of my own websites over the years, such as bradlaugh.com, history-punk.com, and environmentalhistory.us. This was back in the day when the web was more powerful than social media. People all over the world found my content. When I announced a content drop on Twitter, all the environmental historians, who all followed each other, would check it out.
The landscape has changed quite a bit. I'm thinking about ways of both finding content to read (watch, listen to) and also getting my ideas out there in a way that people who might be interested can find them. In the long run, I want to think about this more in terms of building communities than creating a mailing list I can own. In the last meeting of my book club it came out that a guy who had been promoting himself as an advocate of analog zettelkasten note-taking, who I thought was secretly more interested in promoting his newsletter, was apparently even more interested in selling a platform to other folks who want to get rich as content creators. On the one hand, this is probably a pretty good business plan. But on the other, I'm a bit sad. Was it all just BS designed to build a market, all along?
I also just read
’s post about Substack becoming a publisher, which I thought was interesting. I wonder whether and are familiar with the people who made Pressbooks? I haven't done all the things I need to do yet, I suppose, to test whether it's possible to build this type of community. I imagine some of it involves once again having my own sites, but probably also trying to connect with people on places like Substack, which may be as close as I can stand to get, these days, to social media. I haven't really explored Medium yet. Nor Mastodon. I've dipped a toe into Reddit from time to time. I'll keep working on it and let you know how it goes. Any suggestions? Let me know.
The comments in the book club about the analog zettelkasten advocate selling his marketing platform explained something I'd encountered this past week.
I'd heard about a book that I was interested in but couldn't find anywhere. I did find the author's website but it didn't have any information on the book at the time. (It does now). There was an option to sign up for an email list but the terminology around applying to join the group and being judged if was a fit made the whole thing seem rather elitist which was a little off-putting. I signed up for the email list anyway. It took a day but I made it past whatever nebulous vetting process there might have been and I was accepted into the membership for the newsletter. A few days later I got an email saying an email would be coming the next day about the book. I got an email then next day saying another email would be coming later that day with how to get the book. When I finally got the email with information about how to get the book, I discovered it was a "free" book but I had to pay shipping. I was interested enough in the "free" book to pay for the overpriced shipping. (Something I'm already feeling was probably a mistake.) I was then given the opportunity to get three more "free" items. All three of the items were something I wanted. However, to get them, I had to sign up for a print-only monthly newsletter that was be "free" for the first month but felt massively overpriced thereafter. And, of course, that first "free" month required the payment for more of the overpriced shipping (almost as much as the shipping cost for the physical book). Since I didn't want to pay for more overpriced shipping of another "free" item and I wasn't remotely going to sign up blindly to a print-only newsletter which may or may not actually interest me, I am not getting the three other "free" items that I was interested in. Those three "free" items went from being a perk to being something I consider to be a negative aspect of the overall deal. The whole bit about the newsletter surprised me given I was already approved and had gotten an email stating I was "officially a member of my newsletter".
The marketing methodology was a clear clone of the analog zettelkasten advocate's approach all the way down to having a quirky tagline at the end of the email. the transparent marketing aspect of the marketing approach rubbed me the wrong way. If I'd gotten the other three "free" items for free as a bonus forgetting the physical book then I would have been much happier with the overpriced shipping on the book. For that matter, I would have been even happier if I'd been able to get the book on Kindle for a nominal price ($2.99 or less) or "free" as part of my Kindle Unlimited subscription. A free (meaning no cost and no shipping cost) first issue of the newsletter would have gotten me to at least consider the newsletter. Realistically, given the print-only nature of the newsletter, I doubt I'd have subscribed to it. I prefer to read digitally. Unfortunately, the book is also print-only without the three "free" items for subscribing to the newsletter. If the intent had really been to give away the material then something like Kindle Unlimited would seem like it might fit that intent. Instead, the reality is that the "free" aspect was clearly a marketing gimmick and the material wasn't actually free.
There are several things about this process which have actively reduced the chances of me spending money on things from either individual in the future. The irony of all of this is that the marketing tactics which were attempting to make me a paying member of this community for an ongoing basis had exact opposite impact on me. The claims about "covering shipping costs" of "free" items rang false and has lowered my trust towards both individuals. This took someone I considered to be a promising individual to someone I feel has been tainted by an unfortunate mentorship and copying what I consider to be a transparent marketing approach focusing on making money rather than providing value. All of that is a shame since I do wish this individual success and started out wanting to support him. I'm much less likely to pay for any additional content from this person unless the "free" book is outstanding.
Not sure if you've seen/found it before, but as academia has been having bigger problems with granting tenure over the past 20 years, there's been a rise of discussion of alternate academia pathways, often under the term #AltAc in social media and other locations. Careers in writing in other spaces have certainly abounded here.