Are You A Great Writer, Or A Successful One
However you feel about the opportunities for writers made possible by social media, one thing is clear: technology allows us to be successful writers by monetary standards without being great writers by literary standards.
Prior to social media, being a great writer was the singular precursor to being a successful writer. But success in those days simply meant “widely read and enjoyed”, which may or may not have equated to the financial version. But there was no success without great writing. Now, this lovely paradigm created by humans/for humans has been dismantled — or “disrupted”, in the parlance of technology — by social media.
Remember that “disruption” is just a euphemism for the hijacking of a paradigm by technology in a way that strips it of all humanity, but makes you more competitive in the financial sense. While disruption is great for the bottom line of the disrupters, is it great for the disruptees? In this case, the consumers of great writing?
The technology version of success is the number of clicks-throughs. Because it is the technology version, it is also the financial version for those that depend on technology as the vehicle for reaching their intended audience. And, technology knows only that which can be quantified, not qualified.
In this disrupted age, the job of being a writer is one of studying computer algorithms and writing catchy “teaser” headlines that get people to click-through to some message. Whether or not that message lives up to the promise of the headline, or whether or not the writing is ever read or enjoyed, becomes irrelevant in this competitive version of successful writing.
To wit: I was researching the latest advice on making money as a short-form writer, and I stumbled upon a checklist of priorities published by one of the biggest online gateways for article writing. This list was touted as best practices for producing the greatest degree of financial success (read: click-throughs upon which compensation is based). Here is that list:
- Plan Your Content with Keyword Research
- Understand Search Intent
- Optimize the Length of Your Blog Post
- Focus on Readability
- Write a Captivating Title
- Add a Meta Description to Your Post
- Link to Relevant Internal and External Resources
- Add Images and Videos to Your Posts
- Use Categories and Tags to Organize Content
- Write the Best Piece of Content on the Topic
- Encourage Social Media Shares
- Optimize Your Older Writing
Notice that being a great writer doesn’t show up until #10 on this list; even then it’s couched in competitive terms. One could argue that “readability” (#4) is about good writing, but since the readability identified here is determined by a computer algorithm I am not ready to say that it measures connecting with your audience.
If you still remember a former world where the quality of the writing was preeminent — as in, it would have been #1 on the list — you are a dying breed. Writers today are taught a very different notion of success based on this technology model, rather than the one that relied on an artful use of words.
To me, this portends a world where those who make the most money from writing are those who can trick the most number of readers into clicking on a headline, not those who can actually impart important ideas through a masterful use of language.
Will I have the integrity to choose mastery over trickery as the measure of my success? Just as important, will you?
Or, will this soon be the only version of success anyone knows? That is what technology is hoping for.
I’m not suggesting you can’t still be both great and successful, but depending on technology to take on a job that used to be done by actual humans means you must play by its rules. Relying on social media as a primary conduit for your writing is an unholy alliance.
