Everybody Has to Self-Promote Now. Nobody Wants To.

We really ought to help them out. We all ought to buy more albums on Bandcamp or subscribe to worthy Substackers or whatever. But I have a hunch that those people are going to succeed no matter what.

The real question is whether those huge dinosaurs—major record labels or movie studios or non-profits—start working in the same direction. If they star

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In Rebecca Jennings’s Vox long read on the necessity of authorly self-promotion, she interviews William Deresiewicz, whose book The Death of the Artist breaks down the harsh conditions for artists seeking an income in the digital economy. Deresiewicz used to think “selling out”—using the most sacred parts of your life and values to shill for a bran... See more