Comment by Kye
4 years ago
It's still very hard to actually bridge the gap between putting something out there and getting people to pay for it. All those platforms did was expand the lucky few from .1% to 1% of people trying. A big jump, but few people make enough to cover the costs, much less live on it.
Kye, Completely agree with this. Making it big as a creative remains elusive for but a few, and may actually be harder today due to your point (this plus the fact that powerful creative tools are in so many more people hands thus we have a glut/logjam of talent being overlooked).
Arguably a lot of people buy into the buzz around becoming a Tik-Tok, YouTube, or whatever star when the reality is that it's about as likely for most as becoming a Hollywood star is.
Whatever the form, content by itself just doesn't pay a lot for most and never has. I just finished a new edition of a book of mine. It's valuable for "branding" (ugh term I know). But I'll directly make less money than from cranking out a blog post for some company.
Ghaff, some good points too. And am I reading you right; you're saying you could (are) potentially earn more from writing a (paid) blog post than from your own book?
Yes. Exactly.
There are a bunch of reputational benefits to certain types of book writing which (probably) lead to significant career/comp benefits. But the direct money can be less than what companies will pay for a ghostwritten content marketing-type blog. Or even whatever a lot of salaried people earn for doing that sort of work on company time. There's a reason a lot of "creatives" end up working for corporate product companies as their day job.