The Thursday! Newsletter 2-5: What is a Gatekeeper, Anyhow?
Volume 2, Issue 5
UPDATE: We woke up this morning to find all the floors in our apartment completely saturated with water. We are flooded and have to bail out to a hotel for at least a couple of days. I don't think this will affect next week's newsletter, but it might. I'm just letting you know. Thanks for hanging in with me. I'm just a teeny bit stressed out this morning.
I've been thinking about gatekeepers a lot lately.
Remember gatekeepers? We allegedly got rid of them when digital media got big and we all became creators. When blogs ruled the Earth and amazon opened up book publishing to all and sundry, we banished the gatekeepers to their bogs and caves where they squatted and grumbled about how they no longer controlled whose work went out to the wider world and whose work ended up in countless desk drawers, never to be seen again.
But did we, though? Did we really banish the gatekeepers or did we only wish we banished them when what we really did was shift the job description of "gatekeeper" onto a whole bunch of other people, including ourselves?
Back in the Bad Old Days of Creativity, it is said, if you wanted to publish a book, you had to find an actual publisher who worked for a big company to turn your book from a stack of paper in a thick envelope into a more presentable stack of paper, bound and pretty, on the shelf of a book store. No publisher, no book, right? Except that's not quite how it worked. You could always publish a book yourself-- plenty of people did. Of course, those books didn't reach thousands, or even hundreds. They reached a few. Dozens, maybe. Self-publishing took a lot more effort and cost up-front, but it still happened. The same was true for music. The fastest and easiest way to a big audience went through a record label, but plenty of musicians did it the hard way and build small audiences person by person, club by club, home-made cassette tape by home-made cassette tape. They scrounged equipment and mixed their albums in basements and garages.
At this point, you may think I'm advocating a return to those days or that these days and those aren't so different from each other. Well, "no" to the first but "eeeeeeeeeh...yeah" to the second. I much prefer a world where publishing a book is easier and doesn't require that I depend on an agent or editor or publishing rep or a shady company that I have to pay. Our world is better for home music studios and Soundcloud and Bandcamp, However, we haven't gotten rid of gatekeepers; we have simply changed who the gatekeepers are. Instead of having to convince one person to love and buy our book, we have to convince thousands, one by one. We no longer rely on a record company to do our heavy lifting, or an art studio. We have to make the sales. We have to seal the deals. We've traded a few gatekeepers for a vast sea of gatekeepers.
More importantly, we have made ourselves the first and most difficult gatekeeper. We now hold the sole responsibility for what works we release to the world and what works we hold back. We hold responsibility for making sure our art is the best we can make it. In many, many ways we have freed ourselves from the tyranny of someone else's taste or particular daily mood. That is good. We are better for it. However, we are now reliant on the most picky, most temperamental, most cruel gatekeeper of all: our inner critic. I've written plenty about my own battles with that particular horrid version of me. You don't need me to go into detail. You know, don't you? You know how hard that gatekeeper is to get past.
So where does that leave us? We live in a world where the gatekeepers are more numerous but also less obvious. We are not merely artists but also promoters and editors and bookkeepers. We still have the same traditional markets for our work, but those markets are fewer than they were even a couple of years ago and the rules for getting into them have changed as well.
You could, of course, ignore all that. Do your art for you and you alone. If other folks like it, hip hip hooray! If they don't, they don't. Who cares? It wasn't for them anyhow. If I'm being entirely honest -- and I might as well be, since it's just you and me here. -- I'd rather make my art with that mindset. I'd rather write my stories and poems to satisfy some need or desire inside myself than for any commercial reason. That seems the best way to go about the creative life. But...that's not working out quite yet. I do aspire to at least a moderate commercial success and, right now, I'm barely above a zero. My failure to get past the gatekeepers is a bafflement and a frustration to me almost every day. I want more people to see what I do, to share what I do, to love what I do, to buy what I do -- but that's not happening. I try not to think about it too much because it drops me into a hole of depression that takes me days to climb out of.
But there may be a better option. At least I hope it's a better option, because it's the option I'm taking and if it doesn't work, I don't have anything better in mind. Here it is. Keep on making what you make. Keep on letting your work fly. Turn your beauties loose into that hurricane of apathy and learn the other stuff as you go along. Figure out how to get past the gatekeepers -- not all of them, certainly, but enough of them to get you what you want. Identify them for what they are -- people you'll need to convince to take some small risk on you and your art -- and figure out how to show them you're worth the time or money they spend on you. In time, you'll be doing what you do because you, most of all, dig it. You can do that. I know you can.
Oh, and the inner critic gatekeeper? That one's a real toughie, but you know how to handle that one, too, right? Just take away the job title. A gatekeeper isn't a gatekeeper if it has no gate to keep. Keep sharing the wonderful stuff you make anywhere you please and the inner critic has nothing to guard. Cool, huh? I think so.
So. Go forth and dazzle those gatekeepers. You can do it. I believe in you.
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What I Wrote Last Week
"Jerry and the Cassette of Mystery" is a story about discoveries and what we might do with them, or not.
"Four Advent Poems. II: Who Wants to be a Shepherd?" is the second of four Advent poems I'm writing this year. This week, I wrote about anticipation and a certain visit outside Jerusalem.
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