How Zulie Rane Whitewashes the Selling of Stories

And why your writing may be too good to be sold

Are you afraid to actively sell your writings because you suspect your work isn’t good enough?

On several platforms, including YouTube, Medium, and Twitter, Zulie Rane provides advice on how fellow neo-bloggers can earn a living as content creators. She has 35 thousand followers on Medium, her posts regularly receive thousands of claps, and she earns a few thousand dollars monthly writing on that platform.

Her video, ‘You Will Never Be “Discovered.” You Have to Sell Yourself | How to Make Money Blogging,’ suggests that some writers fall into a slump because they don’t go out of their way to sell their work. They think their work sells itself or that they’ll be magically discovered by the algorithm or by an audience that will appreciate their talents and craftsmanship.

She confesses that she used to suffer from this cognitive dissonance of writing a lot because she thought she had something important to say but also refusing to do the extra work of selling her writing. For example, she says she neglected to create email lists and landing pages or to choose the right titles, because she feared her writing wasn’t good enough to be sold.

In other words, she presumed she was supposed to provide content for free.

Thus, her video reminds writers that the act of selling is important, so she recommends that we happily adopt a sales mindset and believe that our writing is valuable and that it deserves to be purchased.

The Platonic Tradition

Indeed, neither a digital nor a real-world platform (such as the market for physical movies or books) is a flawless meritocracy, so there’s work out there that won’t likely be found unless it’s marketed and advertised. But Rane’s explanation for how these writers get stuck seems dubious and contrived.

Of course, some writers don’t market or sell their work because they don’t know how to do so, so the reason in that case is just that they’re ignorant. We can set them aside.

A more revealing explanation for this hope that our writing will sell itself is that many writers are repulsed by sales tactics.

This attitude goes back thousands of years to Plato’s contempt for the sophists, for the teachers who charged money for lessons on how to manipulate an audience with rhetoric, which trained folks to prefer opinion to knowledge. By contrast, the platonic philosopher sought knowledge or wisdom even if the latter proved to be unpopular. Indeed, knowledge may be so unpopular that it must be kept secret because it poses a danger to the social order.

To take some famous cases, Socrates and Jesus were executed by the state because their messages were subversive. Selling their messages would have amounted to whitewashing them, to betraying their inspiration for the sake of preserving public delusions.

Spin-doctoring or prettifying a product doesn’t just happen to differ from the act of creating what Zulie Rane calls “valuable content that solves problems for your audience.” The sales and philosophical/artistic mindsets are antithetical, and that’s been recognized in the West for two and a half millennia.

Blog Headlines and Emotional Manipulation

Notice, for example, what Zane says in her previous YouTube video, “How to Write Highly Clickable Blog Titles in 8 Steps.” She says the title should show the article’s value by addressing the audience’s “pain points,” such as by entertaining the reader with emotionally triggering words or by establishing empathy, with the promise of a personal story.

Blog headlines are thus different from the titles of academic writings because the latter aren’t supposed to be sold. If you’re an academic, you should be interested in writing the book or journal article because you understand the topic’s inherent importance.

Likewise, only some readers will be worthy to read the academic work because they alone can understand that kind of rigorous prose, and they shouldn’t need to be emotionally manipulated into thinking that it’s worth reading. Academic titles are plain and upfront because if you’ve gotten through the door to be disposed to read and to understand those writings, you’ve already been trained for years to appreciate them.

Indeed, the Ivory Tower is supposed to be isolated from the capitalist marketplace where the sophistry of sales tactics is paramount. After the Christian Church incorporated Plato’s writings into its theology, the academy came to associate itself with the loftier branch of the platonic dichotomy between those who seek knowledge and those who blindly boast about their vulgar opinions.

Outside the academy, in the democratized platforms where nonphilosophers are free to “create content,” those high standards don’t necessarily prevail. On the contrary, to stand out in this chequered crowd, your writing should grab the reader’s attention by practically any means necessary. Instead of appealing to the reader’s reason, intellectual integrity, and dignity, you go straight for the emotions like a con artist.

Intellectuals, Bodhisattvas, and the Unenlightened Multitudes

While few writers who abhor the sales mindset might be explicitly philosophical in that sense, writers tend at least to be introverted and intellectual. They write because they read a lot and they learn that they can write too because reading teaches them how to think, and writing reflects thinking.

Moreover, they read a lot because they appreciate the more refined modes of communication, preferring reading, say, to watching television. They’re interested in learning and in teaching. As nerdy intellectuals, most writers are therefore implicitly philosophical.

The reason many of these writers are stuck, then, isn’t that their worldview is incoherent, that they both respect and deplore their work, as Zulie Rane suggests. On the contrary, what they fear is the tarnishing of their work by their having to sell it where it doesn’t belong, namely in the capitalist free-for-all where sophistry, fake news, and spam lead the charge.

These writers suspect their writing is too good to be sold; too pristine to be degraded with advice from the salesperson’s dehumanizing bag of tricks; too advanced and cerebral to be oversimplified, and too elevated to be disgraced by any association with the grubby, dishonourable business of making money through fraud, trickery, and other such shenanigans.

Like bodhisattvas, these writers face the prior choice of bothering to step out into that marketplace in the first place, to reach the non-intellectuals, the anti-philosophers who are likely duped a hundred times a day by charlatans and manipulators who belong ultimately to the sophist tradition.

Recall that in Buddhism, the bodhisattva is like a buddha, an enlightened person, except that the bodhisattva refuses to give up on the unenlightened masses: instead of retreating to a monastery or a cave, the bodhisattva declines to undergo the final steps of awakening so that he or she can help shepherd those who haven’t acquired the secret wisdom.

Intellectual writers — as in those who care more about ideas than money or popularity — are in something like that intermediate position. Or they’re a little like Socrates or Jesus who likewise descend, as it were, into the lower, darker realm, into the one in which power and deception rule the day and in which most people aren’t just ignorant, but actively misled by unscrupulous forces.

The Degrading Workplace of Content Creators

Note, for instance, how the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, showed that Facebook puts profit before people by targeting young folks on Instagram. Evidently, Facebook uses algorithms that worsen teens’ body image and that promote cheap controversy and fake news. And Facebook does this not by accident, but because doing so increases the users’ engagement with the platforms. Appealing to our lesser angels is key to Facebook’s business model, so it’s a race to the bottom, not to the top.

Twitter likewise is infamous for its promotion of mob mentalities. And even if YouTube and Medium aren’t as harmful, we can nevertheless assume that their algorithms also largely decide which content garners the most views, by accelerating viral network effects.

None of these digital platforms is particularly meritocratic. The algorithms don’t assess the contents’ quality but promote the videos or articles that already gain views perhaps by sales tricks or by appealing to our animal nature. And these algorithms deepen the rabbit hole by creating a feedback loop, feeding readers more and more of what they’ve already consumed, regardless of whether that content is ennobling or degrading.

Perhaps you’re thinking these network effects are only in service to the classic liberal principle that individuals should be free to decide what’s best for themselves. Let the competitive marketplace sort it out! But Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is supposed to be acting for our best interests, rather than being an algorithm programmed, in effect, to enrich a few billionaires at the expense of millions of duped content consumers and creators.

Casting Pearls Before Swine

We can surmise, then, that intellectual writers are at a disadvantage on these digital platforms, as they are in writing publicly anywhere outside the academy. If they choose to act like bodhisattvas and to try to educate people in those degrading spaces, they must degrade themselves in turn. They must get their hands dirty. That’s the price of success there if it’s not also the price of admission.

Having to market or to sell your writing is the act of paying much of that price. That’s how the debased hoi palloi pull the intellectual down to their level, to phony emotional entanglements, gross fallacies, and exploitations of people’s weaknesses — all tactics that are commonplace in advertising.

Zulie Rane therefore likely reverses the truth when she says writers should be encouraged to think that their work is good enough to be sold. Much more likely is the opposite problem: writers who decline to go out of their way to sell their work are concerned that doing so would degrade their writings, spoil their insights, and divorce them from their muse.

The writer’s agonizing choice isn’t whether his or her writing deserves to be sold.

No, it’s whether pearls should be cast before swine.