When the Rising Tide No Longer Lifts All Boats (Patreon)

Most of you have been with me long enough to have heard the Three Jaguars line: once you accept money for your art (or craft), you are now selling products, not your creative masterpieces. I spent years pushing that so that creatives understood that once they started selling things, they became businesspeople with products to sell and had to go about their work accordingly.

This is great, and I still believe it to be true. What I didn’t realize was that I hadn't taken it far enough.

In our modern, media-saturated world, art/entertainment/crafts are not just a product—something you package for sale to the market—but a commodity. Which in effect makes them fungible. To put it in plain language: the art that you’re making, the entertainment you’re giving, the hand-crafted perfume or hat you’ve made to put on Etsy, is entirely interchangeable in the market’s eyes with something that fills the same niche.  Take the space opera reader who's picked up my space opera. If I’ve done a good job and there’s another similar book in my backlist waiting for them, they’ll probably move to it because it’s the path of least resistance: “this vendor’s given me a good experience, so it’s a low risk to keep buying her stuff.” But if I don’t have that next book, or if they aren’t in love with what I’ve done, they won’t not buy another book. They will go out, find another book with a spaceship on the cover by some other author, and keep reading.

This is true of every form of entertainment, craft, art. That piece of art someone wants to commission? If you won’t do it, someone else will. That jewelry you wire-wrapped to perfection? Your buyer might have really wanted it but if you overprice it, they'll find a different jeweler whose work they also like to fill that need at their price point. That TV show they were in love with? If it gets canceled, they’ll find something else to watch.

Your offering is replaceable. In the words of Tyler Durden, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

It is enough of an existential blow to realize that your art needs to be turned into a business unit that can be measured and sold. To also discover that your creative heart is not going to inspire monogamy in your audience, and that in fact most of them are going to love the one they’re with, is probably over the top terrifying. And yet, that’s the world in which we live.

Now, you will tell me—and you’ll be correct—that there are people for whom a specific artist is irreplaceable. Those people—let’s call them collectors—are rare. Don’t mistake them for people who have favorites. People with favorite artists will preferentially support them, but they’re not going to forgo entertainment or art if they can’t. True collectors who say ‘No, I will spend no money until I have enough to purchase this particular artist’s work’ or ‘everything else is trash, so I’m not going to bother with it’… well. I think I know one. (A friend of mine is a Tolkien fan, and it broke the genre for him. He no longer reads fantasy. He re-reads Tolkien every few years.)

Most makers-of-things will have a small core of fans (people who think of that maker as a favorite). They might, if they’re lucky, attract a collector or two. But any other sales, if sales they make, are going to be a broad and undiscriminating consumer base….and before you tell me that sounds awful, I’ll make it clear that I am one of those broad and undiscriminating consumers with a few favorites (and you probably are too!). This is not some rare thing. It’s not even a bad thing. It’s just how things are. There’s so much media to be consumed that you need never be bored. My kindle is never empty. And if my favorite author doesn’t have a book out? There are thousands of books being written by people who want to write similar books, and while it's not a great substitute it'll tide me over.

The point of this, then, is this: operating in a commodity market requires different behavior. Success is less about the quality and exclusivity of your product and more about its predictability and volume. The creative market’s been moving this way for a while, but I think the signs are obvious that we’re there, and that means if you want to get by, you have to be: 1. Fast. And 2. Consistent. By which I mean you have to make a lot of whatever you’re making, and it has to be enough like the things you’ve made before that people know what to expect. For best effect, it should also be a lot like other things people already like.

In some ways, this is the freest creative folks have ever been to pursue their livelihoods and get their products to market. But millions of people have seized that freedom, and the result is that we all need to figure out how to pivot to serve an oversaturated market with a limited budget.

This is not meant to be depressing—I'm not depressed! I am thinking out loud. I’ve been working up to this epiphany for a while. But part of my commitment to my work involves the willingness to look difficult problems in the eye, and this one... this one is pretty rough. The market is only going to get more saturated as time passes.

So  what I do with this new epiphany? No clue. Share it with you, in the hopes that it’ll help some of you figure out how to succeed, why you’re failing, or why you’d prefer to keep a day job. And also, to listen to suggestions and comments, because you all always have something interesting to tell me. :)