I recently recorded an interview with
for his podcast series Iron Age Marketing, mostly about work on my own Iron Age pulp series 365 Infantry (knock one off the bingo card of “things Jake mentions ad nauseum”).While he’s off cobbling it together, my performance on it gave me pause. It was one of the most natural interviews I’d given yet, but to say I batted a thousand is to lie. I flubbed, I gaffed, I lost my train of thought, I didn’t get off the lines or ideas I wanted to from time to time. But that’s okay. Not in your “everyone gets a participation trophy” way, but in the sense that I’m a 21-year-old hauling ass in the world of independent art and entertainment. I don’t know it all (yet), and provided the world doesn’t cave in anytime soon, I’ve got decades to get better and other shit to worry about now. The past is the past, etc. etc.
It was that realization that made me kill at least five essay drafts here on Universe. I’ve tried talking about everything from how the Iron Age should approach cinema, the issue of audiences on the macro level in many fields, and all of it went from my mind and into the bin. And it’s simply because I don’t know.
I had reached a point where I didn’t know what I was writing about. I know loads about film, but I don’t know how we can adequately transmogrify it into a fully accessible medium in terms of production and distribution, though there are promising voices on the horizon like Christopher Moonlight and the cult-cinema antics of The Quantum Terror, or Paul Roland’s feature-length debut Exemplum, a stylish microbudget thriller with an overtly religious story at its core, both available for free via Tubi.
I know a great deal about curating art and entertainment, but to tell you the truth, trying to change the viewing habits of millions is a fool’s errand.
Shocking, I know!
What we can hope to achieve in the spaces we reside within is to produce the better work, pray history will be kind to our achievements, and outlast the foot-pounds of corporate-backed drivel hurled at the masses through volume, force of will, and quality above all else.
I was blessed to have had such clarity when I did, and not embarrass myself with 2000 words a piece of absolute rubbish. That could’ve been 10,000 words waisted on foolhardy pontificating and mad ramblings. 10,000 words that may now be put to better use on fine stories, pointed reviews, or a million other endeavors worth more than trying to convince readers of things we have neither the ability to control nor a firm handle on as of yet.
One of the aforementioned misspeaks of mine during the interview was “the market is worse than competitive; it’s apathetic.” I failed to assemble the right verbiage during the raw recording, so I’ll explain here as it ties into the bigger picture.
When I say “the market is apathetic,” I mean you are up against forces you cannot control. Algorithms, marketspaces, and plain old fate.
Your audience is part of the market, but they are not the totality. Amazon, regardless of their politicking, do not care who you are on an individual level. Bandcamp does not care. The conduits through which you conduct business and push product in the indie sphere, short of small business and direct lines of communication with fans (fundraiser updates, newsletter, social media, etc.) are simply too large in scope by nature to facilitate competition. Sure there are leaderboards and sales lists, but odds are 9-to-10 you don’t convince people to buy solely on the back of being an “Amazon bestseller” or taking a regional crown on Bandcamp. Like the once-coveted title of “New York Times bestseller,” it’s a title devalued by virtue of saturation alone.
Now my point about this wasn’t to bitch about limited reach within the entertainment market nor define some cockamamie get-rich-quick solution to gaining mass appeal. My point is to take charge of your identity as a creative, hit the ground running on pushing your vision, and grow your audience through personable interactions. Things such as podcast appearances, Discord servers, newsletters and social media. A hard-won and devout following who believe in your vision and yourself as a creative are worth more than a diluted product made to appease trends in the world of traditional entertainment.
The key to this all is having that self-awareness in the first place, to realize where you are in the grand scheme of things, and how best to make the most of that. It does you no good trying to patch the whole planet up in broad, ill-informed strokes. It does you no good trying to control that which you can’t. It does you no good to try and play a game populated by fewer and fewer players, and played with a deck of cards you can’t even touch.
The moment I realized all of this, it was like someone killed the fog machine in my mind and I could actually see. I don’t know it all, and that’s okay. I don’t have everything reined in just yet, and that’s okay. I used to wake up everyday and feel like I’m at least a decade older than I am, that I’m one foot in the grave, that there’s never enough hours left in the day, nor the year, nor my life. I had no reminder that I was 21.
Now I do, and as the old saying goes: “knowing is half the battle.”