The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.
God, this is a depressing read. It’s about the exhortation on everybody, but particularly artists, to establish a “personal brand” to market themselves online. The pressure is particularly acute on artists because publishing houses, record companies, etc. have all decided to save the money that they used to spend promoting their products and instead force the artists themselves to do marketing, blaming them when things are a flop.
Honestly, this is an aspect of “being a writer” that fills me with dread – I’ve never been good at self-promotion or anything that, to me, feels fake or insincere, and to me it’s like, really? Is this it? Is this actually the only way to bring your work to the attention of people who might enjoy it?
And the fact that so much of the self-promotion has to revolve around TikTok, too. A platform I have never used because autoplaying videos drive me insane. Am I really going to learn how to excel at marketing myself and my work on TikTok? Absolutely not a chance. What a fucked up world.