I just read Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer and wasn’t at all surprised by the book’s rhetorical positioning. It’s become quite familiar.
Basically, it assumes that the audience, having been trained in the humanities, is resistant to the idea of learning about the business or economics of writing. This resistance must be overcome so that the writer or creator can more successfully navigate the marketplace.
Here are just a few passages that illustrate Friedman’s rhetorical positioning:
The business aspects of writing and publishing are often neglected in creative writing classrooms, and I think it does students a grave disservice.
In the literary community—especially creative writing programs—it is more or less accepted at face value that brand building and social communications are detrimental to the writer’s work.
A reliable way to upset a roomful of writers is to promote the idea of “brand building.”
It’s the writers who lack education on how the business works who are more vulnerable to finding themselves in bad situations.
The book also catalogs, in an almost customary refrain, famous authors who were cognizant of writing being situated within economic conditions. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chekhov, Becket. And Mark Twain:
Mark Twain’s most successful work was sold by traveling salesmen going door to door—at a time when this form of marketing was considered extremely impolite.
The message is clear: don’t ignore the economics of writing if you want to spend more time writing and you want to reach more people.
While this message has been aimed mostly at creative writers and bloggers, another group of writers, of which I am a part, has been targeted recently: English teachers and the students within English departments, particularly those studying composition and rhetoric. The same calls-to-action and rhetorical moves seen in Friedman’s book have been used to encourage writing students and scholars to be more entrepreneurial, to make things that create value for audiences outside the walls of academia. In fact this was the central push made by Joyce Carter during her Chair’s Address at the 2016 Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) in Houston.
Speaking about the information age and the incredible need for quality communication and critical thinking, she says the following:
You’d think that in such an age, the disciplines that know how to make messages, fine-tun them, research them, teach others how to engage in these spaces—us, in other words—you’d think that we would be in the middle of the action, the heart of the economy, the very center of society itself.
To be at the center of society, for teachers and scholars of rhetoric and writing, means that they must share and apply their knowledge outside the walls of academia. This requires an understanding of the economics behind such action. And this is where Carter’s rhetorical move parallels Friedman’s. Both recognize the same rhetorical hurdle—that the audience holds a deeply ingrained bias and mistrust toward the market.
Carter, in her speech, tries diligently to kick this hurdle to the side, giving numerous examples of entrepreneurial projects created by professionals in the fields of English, rhetoric, and communication:
You may be saying to yourself, most of these examples don’t have anything to do with writing or composition—but let me remind you every company, every patent, every invention I’ve highlighted was made by a member of our profession….
…and the line that inspired the title of this post:
…these companies should not be seen as anomalies, pet projects undertaken by writing teachers gone bad.
What Gives This Argument Its Urgency?
The idea that writers should engage in the market, rather than shun it, is not new. Ten years before Carter made her speech at the CCCC, Richard Lanham published The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Writing about the importance of style in an attention economy, Lanham says the following:
The arts and letters, which create attention structures to teach us how to attend to the world, must be central to acting in the world as well as contemplating it. (my emphasis)
I was just finishing my undergraduate degree when Lanham’s book was published, so I’m not sure how much impact the book had on English and writing departments at that time or even over the next ten years, except I know that Carter and Lanham share the same sense of urgency, and today’s urgency feels a bit more urgent. To see a text like The Business of Being a Writer appear as part of a book series from a respected academic book publisher is, to me, just a sign of this enhanced urgency—and of the growing audience for such work.
The reason for this enhanced urgency in 2018 is embarrassingly obvious. Technology has changed our relationship to media; it has moved us from being consumers to being consumers and producers in the attention economy. And it’s not just the ease of publishing that changes us. It’s the expanding availability of free or cheap digital tools for managing relationships with our audiences and to use that relationship to scale our ideas within the marketplace.
Social media marketing is free. Email lists can be maintained for free up to 2,000 subscribers. Book publishing on Amazon. Video course publishing. Live streaming. Membership and donation platforms like Patreon. All of these are free or extremely cheap. Even paid campaigns have become within the reach of everyday people. I’ve heard of bloggers and other content producers running ads for $3 a day to boost their reach. Less than a cup of coffee.
Here’s what all this means.
Free marketplace tools, sitting so plainly in front of us, makes the decision not to engage in the market more pronounced. It binds certain writers to the following statement: I do not use marketplace tools to share my work because I choose not to, not because I can’t. When the barriers were high and the gatekeepers were stingy, this decision had less urgency. Now the barriers are so low and the gatekeepers are so few they can hardly be seen.
Helping Audiences Outside of Academia
I’ve struggled to know what it means to share my work outside the walls of academia. In other words, how do I write for people other than students and teachers of writing. This can be a real challenge. It’s hard not to talk back to your discipline. And it’s easy to forget that most public audiences do not share your expertise or specialization.
For this site, I’ve come up with two tentative solutions.
The first would be to write to teachers and students of writing, but focus on topics that are not traditionally covered in the classroom, in a vein similar to Friedman’s. Friedman says in her book that MFA programs have historically not given much attention to helping students navigate the publishing industry and sell what they create. I think the same lack of support for navigating the marketplace persists within composition, digital rhetoric, and even professional writing programs.
Four years after Lanham’s book was published, I received a master’s degree in English with an emphasis in professional writing. Instead of writing a master’s thesis, I opted for a digital capstone project for which I built a website using Google Sites. As an English major who couldn’t code, putting up a website felt like an earth-moving accomplishment. Never mind the small font and wide margins and obnoxiously poor contrast (black text on gray background), or the fact that the site was basically an essay broken into several parts and pasted onto a web page sprinkled with images and embedded video, I had completed a multi-modal project! I had engaged in digital rhetoric! I had published my work in the real world!
But I didn’t really learn how to ethically navigate the attention economy of that real world. I did learn a lot about ethics and value in terms of the professional or technical writer’s role within an organization. But not much about the potential or even responsibility that an English major has for engaging in the digital public sphere.
Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps there are some programs that have taken a more entrepreneurial turn. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic aspect of writing is still largely neglected. It certainly was when I was a student.
So maybe I could focus on sharing content that would support English and Comp majors in their efforts to heed Carter’s call to innovate and make things of value in the marketplace. I could write about content strategy and using digital tools to reach audiences, all with a bent toward English composition and rhetoric studies.
That’s the first idea.
The second idea is to target a broader audience, readers from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. To reach such an audience, I thought I might focus on prose style. Prose style is an adaptable topic that is important to writers working within a variety of genres. It can be discussed in terms of sentence pedagogy, which like grammar and usage topics, tend to be more palatable to general audiences. In this way, prose style could be a gateway that moves general readers from surface-level concerns of the sentence into richer discussions of rhetoric, persuasive strategy, and the relationship between writer, reader, and society.
Prose style also ties in well to discussions of writing in the marketplace—Lanham’s The Economics of Attention masterfully illustrates how style is a guiding principle for navigating and acting in the attention economy.
Right now I’m leaning toward focusing on style, but we’ll see what happens.
I’m curious if others out there have experimented with creating content for audiences outside academia. Are you working on digital products? Coaching programs? Consulting? Podcasts? What are you doing to share your knowledge with public audiences? I’d love to hear about it. Please share your work and progress in the comments below.