Ghost Audience

or, Investing Outside of the Bankrupt Prestige Market

Apparently you can see views of posts on Twitter now. Who gives a shit.

Clout is a currency for which there is no tangible exchange rate.

JDO and I have seen this first hand recently with Agitator’s download statistics. The reading of these statistics alone is sketchy and doesn’t add up, probably because the server wants us to pay for an upgrade to “boost visibility,” but the number advertised to potential sponsors is that our show can guarantee traffic of 3,000 monthly listeners. Our total downloads are almost 70k and in the month of November alone, 23k US listeners tuned in, plus a low thousands number from around the globe. You know what this means?

It means we started a Patreon and quit spilling the sauce for free. And a tangible and visible gathering of people are steadily showing up over there.

REQUIRED READING

Jay Springett’s got some sage thoughts on leaving Twitter and reframing your perception of the size and value of your audience. You can read, listen, or watch that here. I’m not going to parrot his points, just take 301 seconds to go read/watch/listen and come back.

My knuckles are locked up. I’m stabbing at the keys because our main water line has been frozen all day and I just came inside from tryna heat up the exposed pipes with a blow dryer. It didn’t work. But anyway.

MORE STATISTICS SINCE NUMBERS MATTER SO MUCH

In 2017, less than a hundred people had ever read my work. Then my first novel drops with Broken River and—because we were at the end of an era where posts seemed to be left unthrottled—it was snatched up by almost 400 people by the end of the year. That number has climbed to a little over 500 for that title since it dropped. It has almost 100 reviews on Goodreads. Compare this to a 200-copy limited print run I ran for Hurricane Season in 2021, all of which sold out within a couple months. That one’s got almost 70 reviews on Goodreads. Something to be said for ratios there, and what I’m getting at with all of this which is emphasizing the value of a more exclusive audience. Not necessarily a limited one, but a tangible one. A group of people who not only buy but engage with your shit.

Because all you’re ever getting in the prestige market, the Clout Trade Center known as Twitter/Instagram/etc, is an arbitrary number on your profile representative of a ghost audience. To post is to perform in front of a faceless crowd that you can’t see beyond the brightness of the stage lights. The noise of cheering and jeering is proof that yes, there is an audience out there, but what are you getting from them beyond the shouting? You exit the stage and kill the lights in the green room and you’re alone in a cold, damp back alley with no clue the impression you made on the ghosts inside.

It’s a song and dance one could argue—as a creative person working seriously in any field to be read or heard or watched—is necessary to perform. It probably is to an extent. But a priority realignment is in order when it comes to where we are investing time and energy performing.

I’m mixing metaphors like a motherfucker, but you know what—a market is no different from a stage when the currency being traded has no value. And the answers of how to instill value and reap tangible reward from your efforts as the pusher of your own art—of how to cultivate an organically engaged, returning, and growing audience—is something I’m going to be exploring and reporting back on here regularly.

I recently sent books to E Rathke and David Simmons when they were peddling Broken River at venues in their respective cities. Both of them sent me more money than I make in an average six-month span of just posting links. So having boots on the ground is an obvious step in the right direction. I’ll be going to market soon with boxes of books, I’ll be creating more content for the paid subscribers of the growing Agitator channel, and I’ll be open to more ideas of spreading the work around beyond the arbitrary view counts and the faceless crowds. I’ll be reporting back. We’ll figure this out.

Meantime, look: followers, views—that shit don’t matter if it’s not reflective of how fat your pockets are, how enriched your life is, how inspired you are to make cool shit, or the level at which your work is being engaged with. Something to think about and internalize in an attempt to de-psyop ourselves from the false religion of online prestige.