Should Writers Want Huge Audiences?

The upside and downside of popularity for writers

If you’re an average writer on Medium, chances are you’d love to become wildly popular on that platform, for some of your pieces to go viral until you find yourself with tens of thousands of readers and you’re making serious money.

Elsewhere, in “How to be Popular and Fake on Medium,” I considered what it likely takes to turn that dream into reality. Now let’s reflect on whether we should want that outcome, whether becoming a highly popular, well-read author would be worth the effort.

How Popularity Benefits an Author

The upside to becoming a sensation on Medium is perhaps more obvious than the downside. Of course, you’d earn more money and potentially a lot more, maybe even enough to live on — and all of that just for writing down your opinions or stories!

You might become somewhat famous, which means people all around the world might know your name and long to meet you and stand in line just for your autograph or to buy you a beer.

So theoretically, you’d be able to meet some of those people and learn from them, by engaging with them in the comments, for example, which could benefit your writing. As the head of this community, with hundreds of readers and fellow-writers commenting on each of your articles, you’d be in the position to make some friends. If you happen to be single, you might even be able to leverage your fame for dating purposes.

You could also further capitalize on that popularity and go on speaking tours.

More psychologically, the author’s immense popularity might indicate she’s doing something right, which would boost her self-esteem. At least, she’d lack the stress of a struggling artist.

Slaves to Fame

As for the disadvantages of this kind of popularity, they’re insidious. As in all cases of celebrity, what you lose most of all is the freedom that derives from anonymity. In particular, a very popular writer on Medium would find herself having to cater to a large audience. She could no longer pretend she’s writing mainly for herself and her muse. She’d have to decide what and how to write, based on whether the article would appeal to those thousands of actual readers.

By contrast, the anonymous, much less successful writer has only a vast potential audience. In reality, hardly anyone reads anything she writes. Her burning question is different, since it’s this: Why should she bother to “publish” her writings at all, rather than to keep them to herself? After all, she knows she has only a minuscule actual audience, and there are so many other unsuccessful writers on the internet, that each of their works is bound for oblivion.

Part of the answer is that she puts her work out there for vanity’s sake, because she dreams of becoming more widely read. But most writers are rational enough to understand how unlikely stupendous success is in that field, precisely because the market for writing is both oversaturated and increasingly passé.

So her real reason for “publishing” her work is that there’s nothing more to it: she writes in the first place out of passion or to explore her thoughts and find out what she really thinks, and she makes her work public because all it takes to do so these days is a few extra clicks of the mouse. Just by writing an article, she already clicks the mouse a hundred times on Microsoft Word, so why not click it just a few more times and copy and paste her work into Medium to see what happens? Where’s the harm since there’s so little extra effort involved?

Again, one of the harms is that with each new reader she gains, she should find herself wondering whether that reader would approve of what she’s about to write. Ideally, the writer should be alone with her daemon, with her artistic vision or creative inspiration. Writing is a way of exploring your mind and participating in the Great Conversation that forms the intellectual backbone of history.

Reading the great authors helps a writer form her worldview. But this kind of intertextual influence isn’t intrusive, because the writer likely doesn’t personally know any of these great authors. Most of them are dead, so they’re not part of her actual audience, which means they can’t form a mob that can pressure her by threatening to leave if she no longer writes what they want to read.

An audience can hold a writer captive, in which case she might lose her connection with her original source of inspiration for writing, namely with her unconscious self or her muse or daemon, with the inner voice that seems to possess the writer (and the artist in general) whenever she gets into a creative flow state, making her products effortless.

Tainted by Unearned Success

A related problem is that the greater the fame, the audience, and the community, the greater the temptation to be contaminated by all of that attention. She might fall for her hype or realize that, contrary to the above, she can lower her standards, since rather than worry that her audience will flee, many of her readers may idolize her and mindlessly read whatever she puts out.

Writing in that case would no longer be a challenge or an inner exploration, but an automated procedure, a matter of filling in the blanks in a formula. The emptiness of her work would contrast sharply with her great success, in which case she’d be poised to discover that these cultural competitions are fundamentally meaningless. If her writings become trivial from an artistic standpoint, but remain valuable commodities from a capitalistic one, wouldn’t that imply that the value of everything that’s bought or sold might be illusory or even preposterous?

To avoid going mad from this existential realization, the famous writer might find she can enjoy her success only by fooling herself, by retreating to what existentialists call an “inauthentic” mode of being a person. She’d avoid dealing with the cognitive dissonance by pretending that she deserves her success, that luck wasn’t decisive and that her fame hasn’t corrupted her standards and killed her artistic inspiration.

Needless to say, if a popular writer fears her success is illegitimate and undeserved, if the Google algorithms or the Medium curators don’t make for a genuine meritocracy and end up mostly lowering content standards and infantilizing the audience (because of capitalistic ulterior motives), the popularity in question would threaten rather than automatically boost this writer’s self-esteem.

The more arbitrary the success and the greater the luck factor, for example, the more insidious success becomes because it’s liable to reveal the extent to which conventional, consensus reality as a whole is a subjective sham.

Taking ethics into account, we might be led to think that if the more popular articles on an internet platform are infantilizing, as in the case of listicles or self-help frauds, their perpetrators ought to be shunned rather than rewarded with higher circulation.

Again, the more likely scenario is that the popular writer learns to live with her status, by convincing herself that the business of writing is just as worthy and respectable as the art of writing. And of course ethics has little place in business, since nice guys finish last.

Artistic and Capitalistic Incentives

On the contrary, though, the difference between the art and the business of writing is clear. The art has to do with creative passion and the desire to improve, which cause a writer to write even when no one else is reading her.

For example, I started my blog in late 2011, where I’ve been “publishing” my philosophical articles continuously up to the present date in late 2020. When I started I had not a single actual reader other than me. Not one.

I wrote purely to explore my worldview, to express my ideas and figure out how they might best hang together. I still recall the pleasure of those early months, after having written around fifty articles on philosophy, religion, politics, and cultural criticism; there was a time when I remembered every single twist and turn of each of those early articles. By articulating my thoughts, I’d expanded my mind.

I picked up some readers along the way, but compared to Medium writers with tens of thousands of followers, I’m unsuccessful as a writer — in purely capitalistic terms, of course. Yet the point is that here’s a telltale sign of a genuine writer: if he or she keeps writing a lot with zero or relatively few actual readers, that’s a writer — not a successful one, to be sure, but a real one, a writer that’s likely fuelled by a creative vision.

Now we can ask what kind of internet writer becomes extremely popular. What kind of writer begins to make thousands of dollars on Medium, for example? Some may work hard for years to become well-read and well-known. Others may go viral by fluke or by the whim of mercurial editors or algorithms. Others may “sell out” and dumb-down their output to infantilize or fool their audience. There’s likely a luck factor, too, in becoming highly successful.

But suppose a real, artistic writer becomes wildly popular. The question is whether that writer can retain her integrity despite her popularity. Perhaps she can, but she’d be tempted to surrender to the worst impulses of the marketplace.

Can a real writer become a fake, tainted one over time, due to her fame? Can she become a hack or a fraud? Sure she can. Perhaps not every visionary author would succumb to the capitalistic (anti-artistic) incentives, but this potential is evidently a downside of success for writers (and for content creators in general).

The Upside and Downside of Fame for Writers

Technology has made publishing all-too easy. Amateurs have flooded the internet with content, trivializing art of all stripes. So it’s obvious why writers make their work public: as I said, they do so because publishing on the internet is easy. That deluge of content is therefore next to worthless — again, in purely capitalistic terms, since the price of oversupplied products plummets.

As to whether a writer should want to become highly successful and reach a huge audience, the answer depends on what we think about the deeper question of why the writer bothers to write in the first place. If she’s a genuine, artistically-driven writer and would write even with no audience to speak of, she’d have doubts about the overall value of acquiring a huge following on any platform. The audience could function as an albatross around her neck.

However, you can’t write if you’re starving, so the prospect of earning a living as a writer can obviously outweigh that idealistic concern.

But the point is there is a conflict here; there’s a clear upside and a significant downside to writing for a large actual audience.

Even with my relatively small audience, I still find the unwanted thought sometimes crossing my mind, of whether this or that article would have a better chance of doing well on Medium. Thankfully, because of my genre, this thought doesn’t arise for me with much force, because I’m in the “business” of telling folks what they don’t want to hear: I’m dispensing what I take to be philosophical truth. Therefore, none of my articles is likely to do especially well on democratic or business-driven internet platforms.

The question for a writer like me, then, is this: If by some accident I happened to gain a much larger audience, could I keep writing on such philosophical topics or would I first have to sell out, distort my vision, and betray my inspiration? Would I have to switch to telling people what they want to hear, even if the uplifting message were to have little intellectual merit? Would I have to start lying to others and to myself?

Or are those just the sort of Romantic doubts that we could expect to comfort unsuccessful artists and rationalize their unpopularity?

What’s the writer’s ultimate goal, art or profit? Love of knowledge or fame and wealth? Enlightenment by insights or entertainment by delusions? And can you be a highly successful artist without the equivalent of winning the lottery?

Should we expect great art to be especially popular? Is democracy or a free market meritocratic? Or is art supposed to be chthonic, a subversive subculture that goes underground to escape the ravings of the benighted mob?