The Riff!

Many of us have platform angst, even envy. The notion of platform sits on our chest like an elephant. We can’t breathe. We panic. We fear we’ll never find readers, or the real challenge: convincing an agent or editor to take us on as a marketable, bankable piece of stock.

The IPO of us (shoulda been the title of this rager) rests largely on this idea of platform. And, for many, social media is what people think of w/r/t platform. It’s merely a branch of the family tree of platform, but it isn’t the entire game. I’d argue it’s one of the smallest , but it has the capacity to hijack the entire enterprise.

Instead of a family tree, a better depiction of platform is a pie chart. The fraction of which varies, but it’ll look something like this:

• Your social media following

• Your email list

• Your podcast listeners

• Your YouTube following

• (And here’s what people forget) The other people you have access to, or relationships with.

So long as you’re not being a total vampire, if you have a relationship with someone in your network who has 300,000 followers on Instagram, that’s an extension of your platform even if they’re not “yours.” You shouldn’t be a lamprey glomming onto big sharks and hitching a free ride. You still need to do the work of planting and cultivating your own garden, one that you can share with others as your influence steadily and organically grows. It’s unfair and sleazy to ask someone else who has cultivated a platfor — ideally through years — and then you say, “Mind if I bum a smoke?”

This idea of widening the scope of what it means to have platform came from the new book Hungry Authors: The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing, and Publishing a Nonfiction Book by Liz Morrow and Ariel Curry (pod forthcoming where we talk about this quite a bit). What happens when we worry about social media being the endgame of all things platform is we run the risk of losing our time and energy for a service that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. Also, if you’re trying to “decode” an algorithm, trying to hack its rules, you’re wasting your time. You own none of that. As Morrow and Curry write, “The only truth about platform is that no one quite agrees on how valuable or necessary it is to your publishing success.”

All this is to say, it’s very possible to get your work attention without (increasingly meaningless) social media adherence. Those systems are meant to tug on our most primitive psychologies, to lock us into their platforms, to get us to buy stuff, to exploit us.

By all means have social media handles, but platform is far more holistic than we’ve been led to believe the past fifteen years or so.

Being good at social media won’t get you where you want to go.

It is so, so difficult.

But while others waste their time falling into the Valley of Algorithmia, you’re building a root system based on permission, one immune to technological erosion.

Rage.

The Books!

I. Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon by Mirin Fader. Mirin gave us Giannis, now she takes a similar look at Hakeem the Dream.

II. Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy by Brooke Champagne. An arresting voice right from the first page. #douchechills (It’s in the book. I feel like I need to make that clear.)

III. Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America by Taiyon J. Coleman. There’s a moment in these essays that ripped my guts out, man.

IV. Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home by Chris La Tray. Chris also has a great newsletter, “An Irritable Metis,” and is the Montana Poet Laureate.

The Other Stuff!

V. Can you afford to write like John McPhee? (h/t Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity for drawing attention to this 2017 essay).

VI. I usually steer clear of videos of this nature, but, I was like, get your head out of your ass, B.O. This from Bookfox, about the nine steps to writing a short story, which might just as well apply to personal essay. This riffed on an essay from Tin House’s The Writer’s Notebook II.

VII. Derek Sivers says make a “now” page. So I did. Here’s mine.

VIII. Louisa Thomas, a sports columnist for The New Yorker, is appointment reading for me. I seek out her byline. When I find it, I pounce. Here she writes about Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes and the game of chicken power pitchers play with their elbow health, namely the ulnar collateral ligament. New pod with her coming shortly.

IX. Evan Ratliff, author of The Mastermind and a former co-host of recently sunsetted Longform Podcast, produced an incredible podcast called “Shell Game.” The first season chronicles what happens when he cloned his own voice, and thus begin’s a six-episode arc of what this sector of AI might mean for us. Evan independently produced the show, which I find pretty cool. Pod TK.

X. Time won’t slow down, but we can.

XI. I have a groovy little partnership again with the folks at Longreads where I share a little excerpt from the podcast. This month’s was a snippet from my amazing chat with Darcy Frey about not using tape recorders.

I don’t use affiliate links, so my recommendations have no bias.

ICYMI: August on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Episode 423: Rhana Natour and Eman Mohammed Take You Up Close for The Atavist

Episode 424: Tommy Tomlinson on Aiming for One-Word Summations, the Blurt, and 'Dogland’

Episode 425: The Most Brazen of Genres with Madeleine Blais

Episode 426: Aksing for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Myster of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor

Episode 427: Kelsey Rexroat on Dealing with the Monstrosity

Coda

Also, for face-to-face time and to support the podcast, you can window shop at patreon.com/cnfpod. I put out a call for questions for journalist and producer Evan Ratliff when I talk to him about “Shell Game.”

And if you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot, send it to [email protected] and I’ll coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words.

Thank you for reading, CNFers.

Rage,

b.r.o.