Unique selling points are probably essential to getting paid (unless famous). The marketing problem is always (1) the lack of a ready-made audience for really new stuff that is unfamiliar and thus ignored by Joe Public, and (2) the swamping by ready-made competition when trying to cater to an established market. Marketing is political: the rivals who have big fan clubs can put out relative garbage and still remain in business for a surprisingly long while. This is also a serious problem in fundamental physics, where nonsense hardens into an orthodoxy that's defended literally to the death by duped lunatics.
I think social media is useful even if you don't get immense attention, because at least you are putting stuff out there and get the feeling of being free to publish. It is also useful to motivate writing anything at all in the freelance journalistic environment where >90% of external submissions are spiked after a glance, in favour of inhouse journalists.
Hi Nigel, thanks for this. I like the physics analogy too. For me, yes, it’s about exposure or as you identify, at least the feeling of being free to publish what I like when I like, and then very human, impulse to share. Despite only the having a few subs on here, and only half who actually open the posts, it has functioned for me quite well in propelling more visual and porous commentary to do with my PhD. I find the notion of writing to one other person helpful, but my writing here is not really aimed at a market as such. I mean, if I were I’d be writing another how to Substack post. I’m aware there’s also subscription fatigue and I’m not all that accessible as an artist, I don’t think. My question to you, as a physicist, though, might be: “What happens when nothing happens?” By which I’m alluding to putting stuff out there into the world to have it repeatedly fall on deaf ears. It’s autotelic, for sure. WE DO IT ANYWAY. I mean, it’s all vibration, right? My same good friend always brings up ‘strategy’.
This is the Vincent van Gogh problem! Einstein advised having a plan B, like a patent examiner job, but he also diversified and wrote a lot of papers on different areas of physics, especially in his early years. There are many examples in science of suppressed breakthroughs, that were simply unfashionable or needed a lot more PR/further work, than was available. Aristarchus of Samos came up with the solar system in 250BC, but was censored out for 1750 years!
Feynman's path integral (multipath interference) 2nd quantization - quantum field theory, now the basis of the experimentally validated standard model of particle physics - was totally rejected by "leaders of the field" like Bohr at the Shelter island or Pocono Conference in the 1940s, using the "uncertainty principle" (Einstein, Teller, Pauli, and almost all other big shots also rejected Feynman's using false "no-go theorems" based on shaky but fashionable assumptions). The short answer is that they won't publish, discuss (unbiasedly), or anything until or unless some big shot eventually takes an interest in alternative ideas! If you say that fashion is a conspiracy of the majority to ignore innovation, you're dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorist. Feynman finally got published after his friend Dyson explained the theory to Bethe, who pestered his colleague Oppenheimer (who at first dismissed it as nonsense).
Of course, part of the problem in physics is that it's far easier to make some progress, than to get a 100% completely proved theory of everything that's 100% impressive to everybody and can't be easily dismissed. Feynman's path integrals were soon useful in particle physics calculations, although they took decades to be applied to quantum mechanics (which is easier to deal with mathematically by using the physically false, non-relativistic, 1st quantization single-wavefunction wave equation, than by multipath interference). Aristarchus didn't have Kepler's elliptical orbits, so his theory was controversial and really didn't make a useful contribution until the details were corrected, long afterwards.
Another option is to become a critic and fire shells back at the mainstream popularity contest. E.g., Woit was suppressed when he wrote a paper in 1988 showing how the correct electroweak force charges for leptons and quarks come out of a simple U(2) symmetry theory in 4-dimensional Euclidean spacetime, so he eventually set up the "Not Even Wrong" blog at Columbia Uni, to denounce hype from mainstream 10/11 dimensional unpredictive string theory, and he has now published textbooks on the back of that role as a critic!
Ahh, yes, what would Vincent do? Well, prob chop his other ear off at the state of things no doubt! More to the point, many painters died penniless and in debt - Rembrandt, unbelievably, I think I’ll do a post on it. Meanwhile, THANK YOU so much Nige for your very generous subscription! You’ve made my evening! Wonderful!! 🤗🙏
Unique selling points are probably essential to getting paid (unless famous). The marketing problem is always (1) the lack of a ready-made audience for really new stuff that is unfamiliar and thus ignored by Joe Public, and (2) the swamping by ready-made competition when trying to cater to an established market. Marketing is political: the rivals who have big fan clubs can put out relative garbage and still remain in business for a surprisingly long while. This is also a serious problem in fundamental physics, where nonsense hardens into an orthodoxy that's defended literally to the death by duped lunatics.
I think social media is useful even if you don't get immense attention, because at least you are putting stuff out there and get the feeling of being free to publish. It is also useful to motivate writing anything at all in the freelance journalistic environment where >90% of external submissions are spiked after a glance, in favour of inhouse journalists.
Hi Nigel, thanks for this. I like the physics analogy too. For me, yes, it’s about exposure or as you identify, at least the feeling of being free to publish what I like when I like, and then very human, impulse to share. Despite only the having a few subs on here, and only half who actually open the posts, it has functioned for me quite well in propelling more visual and porous commentary to do with my PhD. I find the notion of writing to one other person helpful, but my writing here is not really aimed at a market as such. I mean, if I were I’d be writing another how to Substack post. I’m aware there’s also subscription fatigue and I’m not all that accessible as an artist, I don’t think. My question to you, as a physicist, though, might be: “What happens when nothing happens?” By which I’m alluding to putting stuff out there into the world to have it repeatedly fall on deaf ears. It’s autotelic, for sure. WE DO IT ANYWAY. I mean, it’s all vibration, right? My same good friend always brings up ‘strategy’.
"What happens when nothing happens?"
This is the Vincent van Gogh problem! Einstein advised having a plan B, like a patent examiner job, but he also diversified and wrote a lot of papers on different areas of physics, especially in his early years. There are many examples in science of suppressed breakthroughs, that were simply unfashionable or needed a lot more PR/further work, than was available. Aristarchus of Samos came up with the solar system in 250BC, but was censored out for 1750 years!
Feynman's path integral (multipath interference) 2nd quantization - quantum field theory, now the basis of the experimentally validated standard model of particle physics - was totally rejected by "leaders of the field" like Bohr at the Shelter island or Pocono Conference in the 1940s, using the "uncertainty principle" (Einstein, Teller, Pauli, and almost all other big shots also rejected Feynman's using false "no-go theorems" based on shaky but fashionable assumptions). The short answer is that they won't publish, discuss (unbiasedly), or anything until or unless some big shot eventually takes an interest in alternative ideas! If you say that fashion is a conspiracy of the majority to ignore innovation, you're dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorist. Feynman finally got published after his friend Dyson explained the theory to Bethe, who pestered his colleague Oppenheimer (who at first dismissed it as nonsense).
Of course, part of the problem in physics is that it's far easier to make some progress, than to get a 100% completely proved theory of everything that's 100% impressive to everybody and can't be easily dismissed. Feynman's path integrals were soon useful in particle physics calculations, although they took decades to be applied to quantum mechanics (which is easier to deal with mathematically by using the physically false, non-relativistic, 1st quantization single-wavefunction wave equation, than by multipath interference). Aristarchus didn't have Kepler's elliptical orbits, so his theory was controversial and really didn't make a useful contribution until the details were corrected, long afterwards.
Another option is to become a critic and fire shells back at the mainstream popularity contest. E.g., Woit was suppressed when he wrote a paper in 1988 showing how the correct electroweak force charges for leptons and quarks come out of a simple U(2) symmetry theory in 4-dimensional Euclidean spacetime, so he eventually set up the "Not Even Wrong" blog at Columbia Uni, to denounce hype from mainstream 10/11 dimensional unpredictive string theory, and he has now published textbooks on the back of that role as a critic!
Ahh, yes, what would Vincent do? Well, prob chop his other ear off at the state of things no doubt! More to the point, many painters died penniless and in debt - Rembrandt, unbelievably, I think I’ll do a post on it. Meanwhile, THANK YOU so much Nige for your very generous subscription! You’ve made my evening! Wonderful!! 🤗🙏